That's What Friends Are For

In the period between high school graduation, and getting a life, I had several guy friends I hung out with, pretty much like everyone else back to when cavemen had teenaged offspring.

We liked to sample the local restaurants, both to give Mom's cooking a break, give our fledgling wings of independence a little stretch, and the most important reason of all for 20-something males, to check out waitresses.

One member of our little whitebread posse was, however, shy to the point of painfulness. He would happily check women out with abandon, but was more tongue-tied than Dr. Koothrapali on "Big Bang Theory" when actually in their presence.

But he was a decent guy, and we figured he ought to get a chance to replicate his DNA at some point before senility, so we decided to jump-start a romantic component to the best years of his life. So we had some helpful hints printed up. We came upon two foolproof means of delivering them.

The first was, the next time the weekly youth group newsletter was being sorted for mailing, we volunteered to help out. After carefully stapling our little hints into all the issues being sent to the women in the group.

Phase Two was vastly more simple: my other friends and I made it a point to collect the funds for the check on our field trips into various dining establishments, and just leave one of our little gems along with the tab and tip.

And they were blisteringly simple and straightforward:

Dan Brackett
Eligible Bachelor
(123) 456-7890

It took about four days for the local mail, and we made sure to enjoy a number of nights out on the town, but within about 5 days, Dan had a vague feelilng something was up. On about our fourth dinner out in as many days, he let us know.

"I'm getting calls...it's freaking me out. I don't know why..."

"Whaddya mean, "calls"?

"You know, phone calls. From women. Women I've never heard of."

"Just a second...lemme get the bill sorted out. Everyone kick in."

And we ambled outside to the parking lot, having just hooked Dan up again.

"So, Dan, what's the problem? Don't you like girls?"

"Of course. But my dad answers the phone most times, and he's...a little weird. And I don't know any of these girls."

"Well Dan, we were going to just write your phone number on the check, with "Call me", but we wanted to hook you up with something classier. Take a look."

We pointed Dan to the dining room just as the cute waitress who'd been our server bussed the table. Then noted her looking at our handiwork, followed by running to the server station, and gathering 3-4 other waitresses around to look at what they'd found.

"I don't understand." said Dan.

So we pulled out one of the cards and handed it to Dan.

Panic stricken, he started to lose it.

"Guys! This isn't funny guys! You can't do this to me! You have to stop doing this! I mean it!"

"Well Dan, that's gonna be a problem. Y'see, we put out at least 50 of these in the youth newsletter, so every college age girl in the group got one yesterday or today.

"NO!"

"Sorry, but yes. And we've been dropping a couple of these off with the cash at every restaurant this week too, which probably explains the phone calls. Some of those waitresses were pretty cute, Dan."

"NOOOOOOOOOOOO! You guys better stop. You HAVE to stop! I really mean it!"

"Actually, Dan, you need to consider the fact that we've only used up about 100 cards so far, and we have another 400 left. So if I were you, I'd start thinking of ways to not make us come up with new places to distribute them. Like at the mall, or maybe on the quad at the local university."

We didn't have any more dinners out with Dan for a couple of months. It seems his social calendar got kind of busy, and he had a couple of new girlfriends for a while.