Fun Monday

The lovely Ann is hosting today’s Fun Monday. Her topic is:
For today's Fun Monday, I want to hear about a web site that's changed your life. A web site that you can't live without. A web site whose inventor you'd like to see win a McArthur Genius Grant. A lot of people have said that they didn't think they could narrow it down to one, and that's okay. A top-5 list or a top-3 list is completely acceptable.

You’d think (Well, I’d think) that this would be easy for me. OMG there’s so much we do via the web. At one time I did all my grocery shopping via the web (oh, how I miss you Web Van.) Most of my groups of friends have formed groups on various sites; yahoogroups, googlegroups, facebook, etc…and that’s how we organize all our activities. But still other than say, My Yahoo and Google, I can’t think of any website I “can’t live with out.” To be honest, I prefer those two portals, but if I had to live w/out them I think I’d get by. It would be a bummer, but I’d manage. So I guess, you’re going to get a little story. Lucky you! I’m going to talk about a website that changed my life. I don’t use it anymore, but that’s because of the change it made for me.

DaddySpeak and I met online. Gasp. Yes, we’re one of those couples. This was in the heyday of the dot.com boom. You could do anything and everything on line, for FREE. I was working at a (semiconductor) chip maker and he was working at a small bio-tech, who was backed by a much larger international bio-tech. In other words, we were both at companies that were pretty flush. That means we both were in a world where everyone worked hard & played hard. Twelve to fourteen hour days were the norm, so were signing bonuses, stock options and Friday Afternoon beer busts (at work). Silicon Valley was flush with money & that mean flush w/people. Even the best of commutes would take an hour. As a result, it could be really hard to socialize. In my case, I was working in MarCom and managing a pretty active tradeshow schedule, so my travel was 1-2 weeks every month. I met lots of single guys, but most were geographically undesirable. I had a good friend who worked at an ad agency (where I would soon end up, cause it’s not so much what you know as who you know,) who asked me to check out the beta site on a dating website they were designing. I did, and in the process decided to sign up (the first month or something) was free. You filled out a questionnaire, a couple of essay questions and then based on your answers you were given a match with others. A high match was usually somewhere in the high 20's. From the day I got on there, DS and I were a 37% match, so high it was almost unheard of, except, we wouldn't contact each other. DS is rather youthful looking, and at that time he had long hair, which made him look even younger. I figured he was lying about his age and wasn't interested in someone who was going to start out lying. Ironically, DS wouldn't write to me because of my picture as well. The most recent digital photo I had (this was like 10 yrs ago, digital photos weren't that common then) was from my 30th birthday. I had gotten all dolled up for the party & was wearing a black cocktail dress, long black gloves and a tiara. He thought I was advertising that I was a princess, so he wasn't interested. Funny, huh? Lucky for us his friends were also all on the site & short story long, I became good friends with all of them. DS was dating someone else at the time. But a few months later, when he was single again, he and I sat next to each other during a group dinner (he was single by that time) and well, we've been together ever since.

So I would say that website was life changeing wouldn't you? It was http://www.matchmaker.com/ Tell you what, the one thing I learned from all of this was that sometimes you should pay attention to what others are telling you; you're "type" might not really be your type at all.