The Ad has started to produce responses. As I said yesterday, I wasn't going to check the voicemail box until this afternoon, but I didn't actually do it until a while ago.
I'm not really optimistic.
Maybe it's just me, but I put a lot of points on how people sound on the phone. You would not believe (unless you're a woman and you've done what I'm doing) how awful some men sound when they're leaving a voicemail that is possibly the only impression they'll ever get to make for you.
Let me say right now that I am going to change all the names of any guys who are mentioned in connection with this, to protect the guilty.
"Don" left a message that sounded like he was calling his car dealer to remind them to rotate the tires.
"Mike" couldn't be bothered to leave a real message, he just left his pager number, with instructions that I should leave my number and he'd call me back. Yeah.
"Larry" ran the voicemail system out of time not once, but three times trying to leave what sounded like an entire stream-of-consciousness version of his life story. He called once, the system gave him three minutes to talk, and he ran out of time. Rather than call and leave a follow-up that finished up, he started over from the beginning, only even more rambling and abstract. He ran out of time again, and the third time started over and, by talking a lot faster, managed to get all of his rambling into three minutes, but then his phone number got cut off at the very end. He did not call again. Sorry, "Larry."
"Bill" left a message that sounded like he was reading his own personal ad off a pad of paper.
There were a couple of others, but you get the idea. I didn't get the sense from any of these guys that they had actually read my ad. They probably just went down through the list of "Women Seeking Men" and called them all.
I was not very optimistic after this first round. I don't think I'll be calling any of these gentlemen back. If you are one of these pseudonymous heroes, I'm sorry, but hey, it's my ad.
Fargo's paw was bleeding again. Remember a few weeks back he was licking his paw and it had been sore and bleeding? It happened again, only worse. There were little bloody pawprints on the bathroom floor, and I have no idea how he hurt himself. After some furious licking, he seems to be fine, but I really don't want this to keep happening.
You can leave comments in my guestbook if you want to. It helps to know what you all think.