So my hard drive crashed on April Fool’s Day (which I thought was somebody’s idea of a joke, but it turned out to be the real thing). While I’m figuring out how to get Windows XP Pro on a Toshiba laptop with a new, unformatted HD and a broken CD-ROM drive, mail is piling up at my ISP.
Yesterday, I finished getting my computer resurrected (the whole messy saga is on my blog) and start dumping my e-mail back into Outlook. Wouldn’t you know it? OKCupid has sent me an e-mail saying I have new e-mail in my box and I should check in.
So far, my experience with getting mail at OKCupid has been thus:
A bunch of “Sorry, but…” e-mails from people I’ve e-mailed.
Some young woman e-mailing me wanting to know about my experiences starting my own business, to which I responded with a lengthy everything-you’ve-always-wanted-to-know e-mail but never received a thank you or anything further.
Hi, Opal!
Upon checking in, however, I discover that I have my first “Woo.” Nice! Let’s just see who thinks enough of my profile and pics to send me a woo…
Upon clicking on the profile of the person who wooed me, I am greeted with a GIF of what appears to be a dead rat impaled on a fish hook - Not at all what I was expecting. The text next to this GIF says something to the effect of “Sorry, but this person hasn’t signed on in 90 days, so you can’t see who all the fuck it is. This is no longer an active profile.”
But my hard drive has been out for only a few days! How can it be that I have this phantom woo coming through from somebody who has a dead profile? WTF?
This incident has me thinking that perhaps I should send the folks who run OKCupid an anonymous e-mail with the subject line “Congratulations! Somebody wants to pay you $10,000,000 for a 10% interest in your company!” and include a link to a picture of tubgirl or something.
Last weekend I sent out 4 or 5 flirtatious emails to women on match.com. They were charming. They were funny. They were personalized. They should have guaranteed me 4 or 5 rabid requests for dates.
I also sent out one email saying “hey, you’re really not my type, but I think it’s cool that you watch 24” (and nothing else).
Guess which email is the only one I got a response to?
Oh, damn. I feel for y’all. People suck. Let’s move them all somewhere.
That might not solve the problem, but I tried. I have quit all online personals. I still have my profiles up but I haven’t even browsed profiles in ages. It is simply not worth it to me anymore. I am working on school and waiting to die bitter and alone. It’s kind of fun.
At least you are getting some responses. Going back over the statistics, over the last couple of years and three different services, I’ve gotten about 20 responses to nearly 1000 messages sent. And yet, people who look at my profile tell me it’s good, witty, appealing, et cetera.
Don’t give up hope. I actually met my girlfriend on okcupid.com.
The way I see it, you have to treat this like losing at the lottery. It didn’t cost much to play, and you can always try again tomorrow. Admittedly I was getting kind of impatient at first, but then things picked up and I started meeting women, going out on dates, and getting to know my own personal tastes in women a little bit better.
Aw, sorry to hear you were disappointed that way but don’t give up. This is definitely a trial and error process. After a year of tweaking my profile, I’ve finally started to get a consistent amount of decent-quality responses just within the last couple of weeks. I am not sure what suddenly turned things around…just kept changing things and rephrasing things until I finally hit on a combination that seems to work. I am still the same person I was before but I guess I just figured out how to sell myself better.
If it helps any, in my experience, the people who send "woo"s often aren’t particularly good matches anyway. I usually get them from creepy guys who just want sex or much older guys (not mutually exclusive groups). It seems like people woo when they know the odds are an email will be wasted effort.
This is the scary thing… I’m in online marketing and I can get 20,000 people a month to sign up for a monumentally stupid newsletter, but I can’t get one damned person to respond positively to an online profile.
On the positive side, I’ve lost 35+ lbs. over the past few months. Maybe it’s time to post some new pictures.
What happened to your girlfriend? Or are you looking for special night-time companions for the two of you? That would be super-saucy and I would feel good about having pushed you in a naughty direction.
HINT:
It’s time to break out the armadillo shirt + tux. You were hot.
I agree with lavenderviolet about “woos”: I don’t like them. I think it’s a terribly lazy way to flirt, and I usually disable them. If you like my profile, take a few freaking minutes to write to me!
Sorry that you’ve given up. Hopefully it’s just temporary! I have actually completely surprised myself: 4 nights ago I got dumped by the guy I started seeing in mid-January (and who I met on OK Cupid), and I figured it would be at least a week before I was ready to be “out there” again. But today, I put up a new OK Cupid profile and reactivated my 4-year-old Match.com profile! :eek:
Looking around both sites was a little depressing (no new OK Cupid guys my age/in my area :mad: ), but I “bookmarked” a few guys on Match to look at again in a day or two. And discovered the profile of a senior manager at my company, which was totally worth the cost of membership.
I’m just a little tired of the online personals idea at present, and dating in general. I have a lot of other things in my life I need to work on right now. I just think that, for me, someone I’m interested in is probably going to come into my life some other way. I’m always eager to hear when it works out for others, and to commiserate when it doesn’t, however.
Hopefully it’s just temporary! I have actually completely surprised myself: 4 nights ago I got dumped by the guy I started seeing in mid-January (and who I met on OK Cupid), and I figured it would be at least a week before I was ready to be “out there” again. But today, I put up a new OK Cupid profile and reactivated my 4-year-old