It's Just A Hazard

I was talking to someone the other day who had had a good experience with an outfit called It's Just Lunch. You might have seen the ads for them... basically, they take your money and in the span of a year, promise to set up 16 dates, either lunch or something after work, with some other mondo busy professional type person in your area. She said the magic phrase, which is, "there's a lot more women than men on there," which is bass-ackwards to practically every other online or dating venue, so I figured, OK, I'll take a look.

I was initially put off by their largely-content-free website, which primarily consists of them collecting contact information so that a human can call you on the telephone. I'm always wary of stuff like that, mostly because I don't like conducting business on the phone. Nowhere on the site did it talk in detail about what, exactly, their service was about, validated number of active subscribers, etc. Nevertheless, I gave them contact information and in a couple of hours some chirpy young woman called me and seemed just delighted to set up an in-person appointment to "interview" me.

I held off scheduling such a thing, and after doing a little online research, I was pretty glad I hadn't. Any outfit that garners more complaints from users than Match.com, despite having far fewer customers, and where the complaints are split evenly among men and women and across all ages sounds pretty much like all the dating services of yore that I ever dealt with, with a minor online cachet and a new gimmick. Basically, all of them come down to, given the choice between setting you up with someone you said you wanted to meet versus getting you set up with "just anyone," they'll completely ignore your stated wishes. I figure that for $1500 a year, I'd do just as well standing outside Clyde's and asking random unattached women if they'd mind sharing my table. I have never in my life had a $175 lunch.

It's pretty sad when I know when a business deal will suck before I'm even in it. I have no sense of adventure any more or something. Either that, or I am gaining good sense.

Most of the Google hits for this outfit seem to be regionalized versions of the same stale press release from the corporate offices, sometimes in major papers, sometimes in those local-business guides in places like Phoenix or Orlando. If it was that successful, seems like you'd have lots of people blogging about the kick-ass lunch dates they'd had. I could find none. Zero. Compare and contrast, I got a bunch of homegrown hits for the phrase "met on Match.com."

And yeah, I still think they suck, too. They just don't appear to suck quite as much, and are much less expensive.

I can see the floor in my bedroom for the first time in a while... I've been cleaning and rearranging stuff and can finally see some progress. Alas, "progress" too often means "sticking stuff in the other bedroom and thinking about it at a time to be announced later."