One Response for "How to recover a lost (date) dating moment?"

1. Si August 18th, 2008 at 2:34 pm 1

   Really?! One solution? Craigslist? What if they don’t check Craigslist? Wait forever? If it was so special and you’re now doing nothing that evening, why not put your back into it a little?
   In this example, you know they work in another office of your company, so you could probably look them up on the intranet, if you have one. Or ask around upstairs until you find someone who knows them, under a harmless pretext, e.g. ‘we were talking and i recommended a restaurant but i just realised i recommended the wrong place’ or whatever simple, flimsy excuse you need to convince your trusting and unsuspecting coworkers. Or not under a harmless pretext – find someone who knows them and ask if they’re single. You now know their name and can email them using the company’s email address style.

   This example is easy. They work in your company! How hard can it be?!

   In general, if you got their name, facebook is your friend, but only if you got their surname too. If they said what they do, you maybe got their company but even if you just got their profession and it’s specialist, you can track that – how many unicycling priests can there be? (or whatever).

   Met in a bar? Ask all the bar staff if they’ve seen them before, if they come in regularly, what nights, if they know anything more about them. The thing about most of this stuff is that it probably weeds out most creeps, as people can often sniff out genuine. If you’re asking bar staff and you explain that you really had this amazing connection and – like an idiot! – you forgot to get any useful details on how to contact them, there’s a good chance they’ll help you, so long as you’ve convinced them that you’re a half decent person.

   They talk about a job which would have a regular travel routine? If your town has a regular morning paper, put something in the personals, if they’re geared up for it. If you’re really keen, put out a normal ad – its a shot in the dark & it’ll cost you, but if you think the odds are short enough…

   In general:
   1. act fast – people around you can be harvested for potentially useful tidbits for a very limited time before they forget what was (to them) a banal moment

   2. be creative – there might be some ingenious ways by which you can find a route to this person. think outside the box – after all, if you get there by some zany route, you’ve got a story to tell when you get there.

   3. be exhaustive – investigate based on every piece of info you have on them. But again see point 1. Do it now – if you think they probably get one of 3 trains to get to a place in the morning, that’s a lot less likely to be true if you leave it a month.

   4. be mathematical – start thinking of the probability of you finding them based solely on what you currently know. Might be a pretty small percentage. Now use every tool in the box to grow that percentage as fast as possible with the least effort possible. You’re more likely to bump into them if you walk the streets at night than if you stay at home, but for all that effort, your chances rise infinitesimally. Spend that time checking out popular bars on a friday and your chances go up a heck of a lot faster. While you probably don’t want to give up on your life to find out “what if”, you can easily modify it to give you better chances of being lucky and bumping into them again – even it just means keeping your eyes open!