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No, maybe a grapefruity sauvignon blanc with fish tacos.
Beck pointed her glass of wine at the laptop, bringing Marsie back to the task at hand. “So, if you’ve got all this math to figure out who to talk to, why and how, what do you need me for?”
“The math will help me find the man, but you’re going to help me talk to him. I need help writing emails.” Not that Marsie couldn’t write. She could write persuasive articles full of graphs and charts and numbers, but writing a chatty, easygoing, get-to-know-you email would take her an hour a sentence.
She didn’t have that kind of time.
Beck laughed and pulled the computer toward her. “Okay, what’ve we got?”
“Well, I figure we can look at the first ten men on the site and see what we get. That will be enough for the night.” Maybe enough for the week. Online dating was, in theory, fine. Everyone was doing it, and it’s not like Marsie was meeting people at work or at bars or at the gym. Though, to be fair, she ended the bar experiment a while ago, and she was at the gym to work out not to talk, and she was at work to work. But she’d rather continue trying online dating than change her routine.
But fine in theory didn’t remove the squicky feeling that she would be looking at pictures of real people, reading what they had written about themselves, and then she was going to grade them. As if they were objects, not human beings.
She reached for the bottle of wine and poured herself another big glass. The spreadsheet helped with her uneasiness. It made the judgments of who to interact with and why less personal. What she didn’t know was if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Maybe it was just a thing, she thought, taking a long sip out of her glass. “Who’s first?” she chirped, picking up her pen and readying herself over her printouts.
Judging by the expression on Beck’s face, she wasn’t fooled by Marsie’s fake cheer, but she clicked on the first picture anyway. “He’s cute,” she said, turning the computer so that Marsie could see the screen.
“I’ll give him one point for attractiveness,” Marsie said, scratching a one into the appropriate cell. She’d always liked doing the work on paper before entering anything into a spreadsheet. It wasn’t always possible, but writing things out by hand helped her think.
“Only one? From what you said about your rating system, I would think a two.”
“His smile in the picture looks fake. But I’ll bet it’s nice in person,” she allowed.
“Whoever you award a two will have to be a paragon of attractive masculinity,” Beck replied. “And I can’t imagine that man will be any fun to be around.”
“That’s why attractiveness of the photo doesn’t have much weight in my equation,” Marsie replied tartly. “Ultimately, it’s just not that important to me.”
“By why… Never mind. I’m sure you have a reason for being picky about the scores you assign even when it’s not an important factor to you, but I’m not sure I want to hear it.”
“Because accuracy is important,” Marsie said, even though Beck had specifically said she didn’t care.
“Accuracy and yet you massaged the numbers to get grades of 100 and 10,” Beck pointed out with raised brows.
The wine in her glass sloshed as she waved her hand over the papers and laptop. “This is an art, not a science.” They both laughed at the ridiculousness of that statement.
The pot on the stove burbled as it started to boil, and Beck slid out of her seat. “You rate the next one while I get the pasta in. But don’t move from the profile. I want a chance to see all of them.”
“You’re happily married,” Marsie said, pitching her voice loud enough to be heard over the cascade of pasta into the pot.
“Window-shopping,” her friend called over her shoulder.
Marsie laughed as she jotted down her notes on Waterski25. He was fine, she guessed. Got a 75, so she winked at him.
They kept going through the men as they poured more wine and slurped pasta. The more they sipped, the longer each evaluation took and the more they laughed, about the men, about dating, about the ridiculousness of rating people on a spreadsheet. And, as Marsie moved on to the last man, the splotches of tomato on the printouts had gotten extra funny.
