Oh, That Crazy Spreadsheet Guy

Once upon a time, there was a finance guy. Like many people in this day of 24/7 work schedules, he joined a dating website in an effort to meet the right girl (we’ll assume he wasn’t just looking to score some nookie). He did well – well enough that he needed a way to keep his plethora of new lady-friends straight.

So he did what any sensible accountant would do – he made a spreadsheet.

He then made the mistake of sending that spreadsheet to one of the girls he was dating. She, in turn, sent it to her friends, who promptly forwarded it to the internet at large. Spreadsheet Guy is now something of a minor web legend, though not thanks to anything cool, like being featured on Tosh.0 or something like that. No, he’s now “Creepy Finance Guy” who keeps track of the wimminz he dates, and he MUST be a borderline psychopath or something. People are rushing to condemn him.

When I passed the story around, the reaction from my girlfriends was pretty much unanimous horror. Oh, whatever, ladies. Like you don’t keep pro-con lists of boys you date. We all do it. We don’t always write it down in hard copy (women, being fabulous multitaskers, tend to keep The List in their heads), but we can always access The List for important discussions with our girlfriends. Here, at the moment, mine looks kind of like this:

PRO: Nice arms, very handsome, pretty eyes

CON: Listens to shrieking thrash metal

PRO: Very funny, always makes me laugh

CON: Is clearly a morning person

PRO: Always remembers the stuff that we talk about

CON: Never calls; is possibly a figment of my imagination

And so on and so forth.

The difference between my list and Spreadsheet Guy’s list is that I’m not dumb enough to actually send it to anyone, much less someone I’m actually hoping to, you know, date. I’m probably in the minority here, but I feel that is Spreadsheet Guy’s real crime. I’m not really perturbed that he kept track of the girls; it’s that he had the mother of all brain farts and thought it’d be a good idea actually hand his list over to a member of the opposite sex. Did he learn nothing from that episode of Friends, where Rachel stumbles across Ross's pro-con list? Friends, I suspect what we have here is a dumbass as opposed to an asshat.

Now, I’ve tried online dating. I have not had much luck with it, mostly because I can’t take it seriously (and I’m also wholly devoted to Style Quirk at the moment). This guy was apparently appealing enough to land several dates, at least a few of which had the potential to go further. So he can’t keep all these women straight. Dude, who can? Maybe I’ve just been out of the dating pool too long (surviving as a freelancer will do that to you), but I can’t imagine trying to juggle several men at the same time…which is probably why I’m not much of a serial dater. They’d all blend together after awhile. I’d probably have to write down some identifying characteristics, too.

I assume that once Spreadsheet Guy started seriously dating one or two of these girls, he’d stop with the spreadsheet nonsense…but maybe he wouldn’t. Still, I’m not willing to barbecue the guy just yet. The rest of the internet is doing that for me. Who knows? Maybe he is as big of a tool as some folks are saying.

Or maybe he’s just, you know, really, really stupid.