Where's the manual?

Since everyone else is doing pages about where they were twenty years ago when Challenger self-destructed, I'll start with that. I was doing some Mac work (some sort of desktop publishing thing, I think) for a small ad agency in Rochester, New York, when several people skittered into a conference room and popped on the television. I eventually went in for one of the endless replays of the launch and explosion, and for all practical purposes the day was finished for just about everyone.

Oddly, all these years later, I am in the exact hotel and the exact hotel room where I first heard about Columbia being lost on re-entry a few years ago. Just as I was back then, I am on my way home from the same conference. My friend Terri messaged me to tell me to turn on the television, because the Space Shuttle had been lost.

Seems like a much longer time than it really has been.

I had a sort of halting IM session with Linda last night after asking the simple question, "do you want to talk when I get to the hotel?" Rather than simply say "yes" or "no," in IM (and email) she went into a long riff about how she "wasn't at my convenience" and how miffed she was that I hadn't called her -- I had tried -- while I was in Orlando all week, and how now that "all (your) playmates have gone home, you come back to talk to me." And how I "owed her an apology."

Yeah.

Mind you, this is a woman with whom I've talked on the phone three times and met once for dinner. This is a woman to whom I gave a caution, "I'm often out of touch for days at a time at Lotusphere." If she's already got this sort of weird martyr thing going on and we don't even actually have a relationship, what the hell is she going to be like later?

The simple, effective thing for her to do would have been to actually write me replies to the emails I sent her -- at least five -- rather than the terse one-liners I got.

As I told someone else a month or so ago, it's not considered attractive to a new potential date to start off a conversation by telling them all the ways in which they suck. Entitlement mentality and martyrdom are not sexy nor interesting.

But, optimist that I am, I'll still call her later anyway. I think a lot of this comes from her sort of expecting that I'll be like All Other Guys(tm), and once she sees that I'm not, she'll understand why I think it's perfectly understandable and sensible that, once one party stops being so damn busy, they'd like to talk to the other party at the first possible moment, rather than wait for some prescheduled signal or assent. If she was busy, she's perfectly able to just say, "I'm busy, call me in an hour" and I'd think nothing of it.

Some women need to publish an owner's manual for themselves. It would help a lot.