I’m in the admin building at work (not the building I work in).
As I’m walking down the hallway, I spot a lady that looks familiar to me but I’m not sure how I know this lady.
As we pass each other, we both stop:
Her: Hey Grrr!
Me: [Shit! She knows my name] Hey! Hows it going?
Her: Go’n good. Ready to get out of here.
Me: I hear that.
[Long awkward pause. Internally, I go into panic mode because now I feel like I have to validate why I stopped this woman in the hallway. So I say to myself: Quick! Say something clever!:
Me: W… Would you maybe like to do lunch sometime? [Shit! WTF did I just say?Seriously Grrr?!]
Her: Sure I’d love to! Just give me a call
It wasn’t until this point I finally remember how I know this lady. She’s an engineer I work with. Only except we don’t normally see each other in person. We normally just talk to each other through Emails. And the only conversation we’ve had that didn’t involve work was that we both love all things Star Trek.
That’s it. That’s all that I know about this woman I now have a lunch date with.
Very surreal encounter. And I can safely say this is the first time I scored a date because of my stupid anxiety rather than in spite of it.
I effectively asked a girl out and then married her (26 yrs ago) primarily because she loved Star Trek.
Our basis in enjoying the same entertainment (fantasy, super hero, ScFi, etc) has been central to us not just being married but actually enjoying spending time together.
It’s so good to sometimes read a funny and positive story on the board :). Hope it’ll work out fine, at least you can always talk about all things trekkie.
ETA: now if you can tell me who’s the female Bob Dylan fan at your workplace, I’ll think about hopping over :-).
Maybe, if you’d been reading the signs right, you’d have known that there was some interest there, and would have asked her out a lot earlier when you were both in the engineering building. So the fact that you’ve got a date with her now isn’t actually because of your awkwardness, but because you finally overcame it.
I say “maybe”, here, because I’m probably even worse at reading signs than you are, and so frankly I have no clue.
Speaking of reading signs, I was a senior in college when the future Ms. Trkr and I met. I had only dated two other young women prior, so I was not really good at communication with the fairer sex.
She and I had a senior level computer class. It was the second of a “block” but I was the new guy (I was co-oping so I had taken the first class the pervious quarter).
A group of us would meet to study and I liked her, but was afraid to ask her out.
To me, she would say bye to all the others in a normal manner, but her voice changed when she told me bye (she denies she said it differently to this day). I have told her that my perception of her saying bye in a “sweeter” more loving tone is what gave me the courage to ask her out. So, whether she did say it differently or not, it is a good thing for us that I heard it differently.
BTW, I asked her out via email (it was a really new concept back then) and it obviously worked for this nerd.
Not to be the wet blanket here, but if a male coworker asked me if I wanted to get lunch, I’d consider it two coworkers getting lunch. It wouldn’t occur to me that it was a date.
I’m with moonmoon on this. I’d just go to lunch with a co-worker (regardless of gender) and think nothing of it… Happy Hour is a “hmm… probably just work”. Dinner is a date. Anything on a weekend is a date.
The above assumes no active friendships with co-workers. I’ve definitely gone out with co-workers for dinner and on weekends where it wasn’t a date, but we were friends as well as co-workers.
One of the weird things about humans is we can be caught in this awkwardness of not remembering somebody’s name. We really ought to get past that kind of thing, there’s really no embarrassment with saying you don’t remember somebody’s name, or where you know them from. When I see confident people negotiate that kind of thing I admire them, and see no embarrassment in the result, so why can’t we all be like that?
A nice dream, but I’m still likely to always be a social klutz.
You could always move to Finland where we don’t use each other’s first names when talking to each other. Of course, it makes forgetting names even easier but that’s a small price to pay.
