New Excuses.

So, after the debacle with Computer Geek Guy, Best Friend and I decided we needed a more solid game plan. Pre-planned excuses. So we spent an evening on the phone, (drunkenly) coming up with our Get-Out-Of-There excuse. Here’s what we came up with:

• Best Friend calls and pretends to be my roommate, who has just locked herself out of our apartment.
  

• The problems: (a) this is not a sufficiently urgent situation to justify immediately leaving the date; (b) I potentially wouldn’t have to leave at all – she could always just come and pick up my keys; (c) there’s no reason I couldn’t come back if I did have to leave; (d) he might offer to go with me.

• Best Friend calls and pretends that I have a work emergency that requires me to leave immediately.

• The problems: (a) if I have given the guy any amount of information about my job, this is not at all a reasonable excuse – I don’t have the type of job that really has the potential to have emergency situations at any time; (b) the believability of this one is low, because of the nature of my job and the timing – what kind of work emergencies (unless I was a medical professional – which I’m not) would come up during happy hour or on Friday nights?

• Best Friend calls and tells me that someone important to me is gravely ill/got in an accident.

• This is just bad karma. I firmly believe that if I pretend that someone got hurt, this will actually cause someone I care about to get hurt. Or cause me to get hurt. The universe does not like me to lie about things like this. (Every time I fib about being sick to get out of something, I get sick).

• Best Friend calls me and pretends to be my ex-girlfriend. Who wants to get back together.

• This one is funny. But I don’t want to pretend I’m a lesbian just to get out of a bad date. Also, this one makes me appear to be a pretty messed-up woman** – why would I have been searching for a man online if I was going to jump up at a moment’s notice and run off to get back together with my ex-girlfriend?

**I do realize that the fact that I’m actively spending quite a bit of time and energy coming up with excuses to get out of a bad date is probably objective evidence that I am, in fact, a messed-up woman. But he doesn’t know that.

At this point in our conversation, Best Friend’s boyfriend chimes in and says, “Why don’t you just be an adult and tell him that it’s not working for you and you’re not interested?” Hmmmm. Interesting idea…