Earlier today, I had a job interview with a spiffy-cool company whose name I won’t mention just yet. The parts of the interview that would be the most interesting to most people are, thankfully, the bloggable parts:
Employee 1: Hey, Joey! Welcome to {Spiffy-cool company whose name I won’t mention just yet}.
Me: Thanks. Nice place you have here. Didn’t realise it was so big.
Employee 1: C’mon in. I’ll take you to {the CEO}‘s office. By the way, sorry to hear about the “New Girl” thing. Feeling better?
Me: Much. You know, I forget how far and wide that story travelled.
We walk over to the CEO’s office, which is right by {Employee 2}‘s desk.
Employee 2: Joey! Glad you could come. Hey, about the “New Girl” incident — hope you’re doing okay.
Me: Thanks! Yeah, I’m okay. I was more creeped out than anything else.
We enter the CEO’s office. The CEO invites Employee 1 and Employee 2 to sit in on the interview.
CEO: Thanks for coming today, Joey. By the way, I read your blog. Really wild stuff, what happened with the New Girl.
Me: It was freaky, but thankfully little harm done. Besides, I think I can drink for free on that story for months.
I’m keeping in mind that the CEO is one of the Internet’s movers and shakers, whose company is a Methuselah (nearly a decade in business!) in a field where startups appear and flame out in a matter of months. He’s so well connected that he had a bite with Jeremy Allaire not long ago and is probably one of the Chosen Few who’s seen the secret stash of erotic daguerrotypes in Bill Gates’ mansion (okay, I’m kidding about the last one).
The interview commences and proceeds smoothly. The CEO then takes me to the desk of a biz dev person so that we can talk.
CEO:{Biz Dev Guy}, this is Joey. Joey, {Biz Dev Guy}.
Me: Hello, pleased to meet you.
Biz Dev Guy: Ah, yes. I’ve seen your resume.
CEO: Yes, but have you seen his blog? And the entry about the perfect girlfriend who wasn’t?
Biz Dev Guy: Uhm, no. I’ll have to give that a look sometime.
I haven’t had such an interesting job interview in the longest time. I hope they hire me.
Me: So, hypothetically speaking, going out with me would be a bad idea because…?
R: Our lifestyles are way too different. I wear suits to work, you wear skater shirts and running shoes. You like to go out; I like to stay in. I like well-planned weekends; you once flew to DC so that some girl wouldn’t have to see the Dalai Lama alone…
Me: Hey, I had some airline points and she was cute. Besides, the Dalai Lama is one deep brutha.
R: Last week, you just hopped in your car and drove to Guelph to gather around a bonfire with people you didn’t know!
R: All that stuff — it’s just not my kind of thing.
How boring — or is stable a better word — do I have to be?
I don’t have any tattoos or piercings because I hate needles. I take my vitamins every day. I’m a non-smoker, I have no drug addictions and I don’t go on serious benders very often. I clear my credit card balance at the end of every month. I visit my parents every Sunday for our family dinner. I know which fork is for salad and which is for the main course. I have never had to phone for bail money from a Mexican holding cell. For Chrissake, I have white couches!
(Seriously, if white non-IKEA, non-discount, non-hand-me-down couches don’t say “stable”, I don’t know what does.)
June 13, 2007: More than five years have passed since the events in this story took place. I’ve decided to make some small changes, namely:
Cleaning up some of the formatting,
revealing the real names of the people involved, with the notable exception of my date, who’ll go by the name “Maura”,
adding a new section at the end, explaining how the date ended.
A Lovely April
I’ve been sitting on this story for a couple of weeks, for reasons that will become apparent as you read on. It’s the story of how I got a really good client, a client for whom I begin full-time work this morning.
It was the start to particularly beautiful weekend in April. The weather was gorgeous, with cloudless skies every day and temperatures that would be the norm for July. My neighbourhood responded in kind, with the sidewalks packed with people in short sleeves, shorts and short skirts and the patios filled with people drinking beer late into the evening. I spent my days programming on my laptop with a wireless connection in my back deck under the the shade of a large tree with a cooler of Diet Coke at my side and The White Stripes on the stereo. I spent lazy summer-like evenings playing the accordion near the patios in exchange for beer, watching cute bands and getting drunk with my friends Will and Tina. Best of all, I had a date with someone very cute that Friday.
Dating and the Accordion
People have asked me if I actually bring along the accordion on dates. I do. It may seem like cheesy romantic comedy behaviour, but it’s been my observation that people actually like being serenaded, even if only for laughs. (I’ll admit that only one person has ever done the same for me. She spent a week learning to play Happy Birthday on the harmonica, and I damn near cried at the end. I’m a big ol’ sap sometimes.)
Good things happen whenever I bring the accordion, and if there’s a time when you want good things to happen, it’s on a date. My luck, if you haven’t noticed, tends to run to the bizarre. While I’ve had some really memorable someone-should-turn-this-into-a-movie dates, I’ve also had some absolute nightmare outings, including one where my date ended up in the fetal position, screaming her lungs out right in front of the Art Gallery of Ontario as a busload of horrified tourists looked on. Although it’s very unlikely that something like that will ever happen again, I still try and shift the odds in my favour by packing a little accordion mojo.
Smokeless Joe
My date, Maura, in addition to being cute and hilarious, was a cervisophile — a beer connoiseur. Knowing this, I suggested that we visit a specialty beer bar after dinner, and she agreed. There were a dozen bars from which I could’ve chosen, and from these I chose Smokeless Joe’s.
It wasn’t the closest choice — Smokeless Joe’s was a cab ride away — but that’s what popped into my head at the moment. I hadn’t been there in a dog’s age, they had one of the most extensive collections of exotic beers in the city, and it just seemed like a good idea at the time.
We were hoping to get a seat on the patio, but Joe told us that he was having some troubles getting it licensed. We took two stools at the end of the bar and proceeded to drink some expensive beers from the French section of the menu. I was having a great time, telling her stories about Burning Man and listening to her stories about her trips to the U.K.
As the end of the night drew near, the bartender, an Irish exchange student, asked if I would play the accordion after he announced last call.
“Go ahead,” Maura said, “I haven’t heard you play all night.”
“If you insist,” I said, unsnapping the two straps that held the bellows shut. I played a quick riff to warm up the valves and broke into Roadhouse Blues. Joe (I’m referring to the bar’s owner, not myself in the third person) favours bluesy music, followed by Born to be Wild.
The bartender and patrons sang along, while Maura couldn’t stop laughing.
After I was done, the bartender slid me a pint of draught (“on the house,” he said) and Maura nodded her approval.
Caught up in the moment, I didn’t see the woman walking towards us.
The Other Couple
“That was great!” she said to me, completely taking me by surprise, as my back was to her.
“Uh, thanks!” I replied.
She turned to Maura. “Your boyfriend is so cute and so talented,” she said to her, “How long have you been going out?”
The fact that she thought we were a couple amused me to no end.
Maura answered “I’ve only known him three weeks.”
“Three weeks? You’re just starting out! That’s so cute!” she exclaimed, with increasing giddiness. She turned to face the other end of the room and call to her boyfriend. “Shen! Come over here!”
It was all falling into place. She was caucasian, with dark hair and Eastern European features, while her boyfriend was Chinese. In seeing Maura — who was also caucasian — on a date with me, I guess that she saw in us an earlier version of her and her boyfriend.
This was squeezebox synchronicity, and I recognized it immediately.
I introduced myself to Shen, and then his girlfriend, Yvonne, introduced herself to me and Maura.
“You guys make such a cute couple!” said Yvonne I threw a sideways glance and smile at Maura, who returned it.
“Well, cute couple,” said Shen, “please come and join us. I have an office just two doors down the street, and I’ve got more beer.”
“Yes, please come!” said Yvonne.
I looked at Maura and asked her what she thought. She nodded. “Sounds like fun,” she said. “And hey, more beer!”
The After-Party and a Job Opportunity
Yvonne and Shen called to the other people who were sitting with them at the opposite end of the bar. We walked en masse out of Smokeless Joe’s and into a brownstone two doors south. Shen unlocked the door and let us in.
I looked around. It looked as if they’d moved into the place recently. There were signs of recent renovation work, and the carpet looked new. The place was clean and sparsely furnished; being a recovering dot-commer, I immediately recognized the furniture as being from the IKEA Office line. Each desk had either a late-model Toshiba laptop or a desktop computer with a large monitor with a red Buddha statue perched atop it. I saw a copy of Visual Studio .NET on a desk, a couple of programmingmanuals on a chair and a skateboard leaning against the far wall.
“We’re working on some trivia games for Maxim,” Shen said, as he opened a closet to reveal a refrigerator full of beer. “If you’re a contract programmer, we might have some work for you.”
“Give me your card,” I said, trying to give the appearance that I was taking all this improbably good fortune in stride. “I’ll give you a call on Monday.”
Getting to Know You
One of Yvonne’s friends turned on some music. Shen introduced me to him as Bryan, and Bryan’s fiancee, Kirsten. While Kirsten and Bryan asked me the standard set of questions (“How long have you been playing the accordion?” “Why accordion, anyway?” “Do you always carry it around with you?”), Yvonne was hitting Maura up for some details about our “relationship”, asking about how we met, what I’m like, and so on. I was trying not to burst out laughing at how absurd this entire thing had become.
While conversing with Shen, I found out that he and I had both gone to Queen’s University. He graduated in 1995, and thanks to my Van Wilder-esque seven-and-a-half-year stint there, our academic careers overlapped for three years. He’d probably read at least one of my cartoons in the paper and attended at least one function where I was the DJ. The coincidences were piling at an unrealistic rate.
Meanwhile, Yvonne was getting Maura’s phone number. “I want us to stay in touch,” she said to Maura, “I think it would be fun if the four of us went out together sometime.”
She hasn’t known us ten minutes and already she’s scheduling a double date, I thought. Still, no one’s screaming the the fetal position, so I’m still ahead of the game.
Maura turned to me and said “Doesn’t that sound like fun, Joey?”
I put my arm around her and replied “Sure does, honey.” I hoped I wasn’t pushing my luck too hard.
We were both trying not to burst our laughing, and nobody else in the room seemed to notice.
Shen turned to Kirsten and said “Don’t you think they make a handsome couple?”
“They do, Shen. Really cute.”
Shen’s eyes narrowed a little and with a little grin, he said “Kirsten, use your woman’s intuition. Look at Joey and Maura long and hard. They’ve been going out for just three weeks. D’you think they’ve had sex yet?”
Oh, sweet Jesus Christ.
Maura and I looked at each other with a “Huh?” expression. Kirsten leaned forward and squinted at us, as if focusing her sex-ray vision.
“I’d say there’s been some fooling around, but I don’t think they’ve technically had sex.”
“Technically?” Maura and I said, almost at the same time.
I raised both my hands. “Wait, wait, wait. I don’t think you understand. Maura and I…well, this is a first date.”
There was a second’s silence followed by a group “Ooooooooooohhhhhhh.”
Shen saw an opportunity and slid beside Maura, putting an arm around her. “So,” he said, “a first date, huh? What would you say the odds of Joey getting kissed tonight are?”
I smiled, but thought If Shen has completely ruined this date with that idiotic fucking question, I thought, I am coming back later tonight with a fucking can of gasoline and fucking torching this fucking place right down to the fucking ground.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Maura said.
I was glad she had a sense of humour.
“Well, I think you should,” said Yvonne. “He’s handsome, he’s talented, and he looks like a keeper.”
Damn, I’d never had a cheering section on a date before. The double-date idea was sounding better and better all the time.
We all talked for another ten minutes, after which Maura and I excused ourselves. We bade them goodbye and walked out into the cool night air.
“I swear,” I said to Maura, between laughs, “I did not set that whole thing up.”
She laughed.
The Job…
I dropped Shen a line on Monday, thanking him for his hospitality and made an appointment to meet with him and his CTO later that week. We had a couple of meetings over beers, and as a result, I have a steady client with lots of future work, all thanks to a little accordion-powered serendipity.
…And the Date
Halfway through a rather nice goodbye kiss, Maura gave me a gentle punch on my right temple.
“You’re weird,” she said, “but fun. Call me.”
With a wave, she disappeared behind the door.
I rubbed my temple and walked home, smiling all the way.
It’s just like one of those old Tom Vu commercials!
Setting the scene
The second day of CodeCon was followed by a dinner at Don Ramon’s, a Mexican restaurant two blocks from the DNA Lounge.
After dinner, those of us who hung out on the #infoanarchy IRC channel decided to have our own little gathering.
Lisa did the legwork and found a place: Butter, which is across the street from the DNA Lounge. Butter is a cute little space with a “trailer park” theme with decor you’d expect, and the bar snacks are tater tots, TV dinners and marshmallows that you can roast yourself over canned heat.
That night, they projected the H.R. Pufnstuf movie, a couple of Land of the Lost episodes and National Lampoon’s Vacation onto the walls.
We went to Butter straight after dinner, so by the time 10:30 had rolled around, we’d already been there for three hours. Our party was winding down and people were making various plans to go elsewhere.
I didn’t know my evening had only just begun.
Note: The names of people who weren’t at CodeCon — namely the names of the stagette girls and the fratboys — have been changed.
“Can you play that thing?”
Even for me, this was kind of unusual.
“Can you play that thing?” she asked.
“Sure,” I replied. Oh mighty accordion, I thank you for sending me yet another victim. And so cute, too!
“Is it your birthday?” It was a reasonable guess. ” Can I play Happy Birthday for you?”
“No,” she replied. “It’s my stagette!”
Duuuuuh. I should’ve guessed that, judging from the outfit.
I played the first verse of Billy Idol’s White Wedding in response. She sang along, waving the dildo as if it were a conductor’s baton.
“You have to meet my friends!” she exclaimed, pulling me towards the other side of the room, where eight attractive and tipsy women were greedily downing blue Jello shots from a tray. They took turns posing with me for pictures and a couple even tried the accordion on.
Brandon walked up to me and said “My God, Joey, you weren’t lying about the accordion.”
“It has powers that science cannot yet explain,” I replied.
Invited
The bride-to-be took me by the arm and said “Hey, Accordion Guy, we’ve got a limo coming to pick us up and take us to a few more bars. There’s lots of free booze and I have cute friends as you can see. Wanna come along?”
Lisa overheard this and whispered in my ear: “I think you should go.”
Duh.
The stagette’s timing was perfect. Our #infoanarchy party was winding down, with many people deciding to go home. Most of us were already standing outside Butter’s front door when the limo pulled up. I waved a triumphant goodbye to my friends and climbed into the limo.
All aboard!
Eight or nine girls, along with three other guys they’d picked up at Butter climbed aboard. Both girls and guys were cast from the same mold — the girls were skinny blondes and brunettes in party dresses and the guys were fratboys with brush cuts wearing Gap clothes. They could’ve easily been extras from the American Pie movies.
One of the girls had the last name Stiffler, which she was never referred to as until that movie had come out. I couldn’t resist the obvious joke: “This one time? At band camp? I took my accordion…”
The limo had a bar stocked with some terribly sour sparkling wine that the girls didn’t seem to mind. After a glass of that rotgut, I switched to the only other option: ice-cold cans of Bud, which was what the Frat Boys — my mental name for them — had also chosen.
“Dude,” asked Fratboy One, the tallest of them, “where’d you learn to play accordion like that?”
“I learned by playing for beer money and fun on the street.”
“Dude. That’s so sweet. I can tell it’s a real chick magnet. Dude, I gotta get me an accordion! That would so rule! The ladies love musicians. Look at fuckin’ Durst from Limp Bizkit; he’s like dating porno actresses an’ strippers an’ shit!”
“I’m soooo there, bro,” I answered, as I did a little conversational impedance-matching.
As the limo zigzagged through SoMa, we took turns sticking our heads out the sunroof in pairs and yelling incoherently. Some of the girls were drinking the low-grade champagne out of the fittest guy’s navel.
I should hit the gym more often, I thought.
Oh. My. God.
After my turn at the sunroof, I found a seat and seconds later, Lisa, the bride to be, sat in my lap, put an arm around me and asked what I was doing at Butter and where I got into accordion playing.
“I’m down here from Toronto to speak at a hacker conference,” I replied. I chose the phrase “hacker conference” deliberately; it has that certain bad-boy cachet that “programming conference” lacks.
“Whoo!” she exclaimed as she both arms around me and looked me straight in the eye. “You’re not dangerous or anything, are you?”
Suddenly the popular myth that all hackers are criminals didn’t seem like such a bad thing.
The bride-to-be bows out
The limo pulled up to the south side of the Metreon building and came to a halt. We left the limo and entered a bar with a packed dance floor playing Top 40 dance hits. We didn’t stay longer than half an hour, after which we piled into the limo and went to Asia SF, where we toasted Lisa with Jagermeister shots.
Forty-five minutes after that, we boarded the limo for the last time and ended up a a place whose name I believe was Cloud Eight. Lisa was looking a little rough.
“Water,” she croaked, while a friend supported her. She and two of her friends went towards the washrooms at the back of the club.
With the bride-to-be about to throw up and the limo’s contract over, it looked as though the party was going to break up even though it was only one o’clock.
“Dude,” Fratboy One said. “Lisa’s ’bout to call it a night, but some of these girls are still ready to go. I think Sara really likes you, dude. I’d be entering the dragon if I were you, bro.”
Thanks for the props for my mackin’ Asian style, dude.
After going to the back to check up on Lisa and hearing violent retching coming from behind the women’s washroom door, we decided to gather those who still wanted to party and go elsewhere. It was down to me, the three fratboys and three of the women — Stiffler, Cheryl and Max. The girls and one of the fratboys got into one cab, while I got into another with Fratboy One and Fratboy Three.
“Dude!” said Fratboy Three. “This rocks! A limo full of chicks!”
“Fuck yeah!” said Fratboy One, “And we got the Accordion Guy rockin’ the box! You made the evening, dude!”
“Sweeeeeeeeet.” I replied.
Fratboy One’s cell phone rang. It was the fratboy in the other car.
“Dude! Dude? No, dude. Aw dude, that’s like out of town. Aw, dude. Talk to them.”
He turned to the cabbie. “One-oh-one, dude! One-oh-one!”
“Where you want me to go?” asked the cabbie.
“Just one-oh-one! We’ll tell you. Just get us to one-oh-one!” Fratboy One turned his attention back to the phone. “Dude. Put her on. Dude. Just put her on. Hello? Who is this? Cheryl? Hey, forget there. Let’s just go back to my place. It’s in Nob Hill, we got a lot of booze, we can turn the music real loud. It’ll be great.”
Fratboy One tuned to the cabbie. “Dude! Change of plans. Washington and Leavenworth!”
Those round-eyes, they’re crazy
As we approached Nob Hill, Fratboy One told the cab driver to pull over at an all-night grocery.
He and Fratboy Three ran out of the cab to buy some beer.
The cabbie turned around to talk to me.
“Those boys crazy. You seem like nice Asian boy, not like them. You are Filipino?”
“Yes.”
“I have many Filipino friends,” said the cabbie, who was Chinese. “They all musicians, like you. But that not your real job?”
“No, I’m a computer programmer.”
“That nice job, even in hard time like now,” he said, nodding. “You friend with these crazy gwei lo?”
“No, I met them tonight.”
“Duuuuuuude!” Fratboy One yelled, coming from the store holding a 24-pack of Sam Adams over his head. “Let’s roll!”
“And gwei lo say we can’t hold liquor,” muttered the cabbie.
Nerds 1, Jocks 0
Fratboy One’s apartment was exactly the way I had envisioned it. Nice Nob Hill building with hardwood floors, hand-me-down furniture from the parental units, framed posters of beer and that cliched black-and-white poster of Grand Central Station, the one with light streaming through the cathedral windows. The entertainment altar was in the centre of the room and was probably the most expensive piece of furniture. The only reading material that could be seen anywhere was ESPN magazine and Maxim.
Fratboy Two made a beeline for the stereo and started flipping through the collection.
“Put on the Oakenfold, dude!” said Fratboy One, who motioned for the rest of us to join him in the kitchen. He started pouring tequila into wine glasses. “I’m all out of shot glasses, dude.”
Max and fratboy three danced to Oakenfold for a while and then disappeared into his room. The rest of us moved over to Fratboy Two’s room, which had a computer stuffed with MP3’s and a nice sound system.
The only other furniture was a snowboard and a bed.
Stiffler and Fratboy Two snuggled up on his computer chair, with her on his lap facing him, her leather-pantsed legs wrapped around him. That left Cheryl, me and Fratboy One, which meant that the math wasn’t going to work out for one of us.
“My feet are killing me,” said Cheryl, as she leaned back on the bed.
“That’s too bad,” said Fratboy One.
Fratboy One was a good-looking guy with your standard all-American features; he probably wasn’t used to having to put in some effort towards getting the ladies’ attention. My own geekdom was about to pay off.
“Hey,” I said, unzipping Cheryl’s boots. I can fix that. “One foot massage, coming up.”
“Sorry if my feet stink. I’ve been dancing all night.”
“Awww, feet. Keep them away from me,” Fratboy One said. Strike two.
“That feels nice,” she said, as I kneaded her feet. They didn’t stink at all.
“So tell me, how’d you get into playing the accordion?”
I told her, during which time Fratboy One grumbled and wandered off into his room.
Nerds 1, Jocks 0.
“Thank you, Accordion Boy”
Stiffler and Fratboy Two were teasing each other in the chair while Cheryl and I lay back and I told her about how the accordion had saved me from a mugging in Prague and she told me about how she and her friends were ripped off by scam artists in Rome. We snuggled for a while until she started to fade.
Stiffler and Fratboy two looked like they were about to use the bed, so I carried her out to the couch, tucked her in and kissed her good night.
“Thank you…Accordion Boy,” she said.
“You’re welcome, Drunk Girl.”
Farewell
The door to Fratboy Two’s room was still open and the couple were still (mostly) decent. I gave Fratboy Two a high-five goodbye and leaned down to whisper in Stiffler’s ear.
“Give him one for me,” I said.
“I will,” she answered, smiling.
I walked out into the streets of Nob Hill and began looking for a cab.
