Reuters recently reported that dating web site eHarmony has created a new iPhone application called the Bad Date Rescue App.
The App allows you to program your phone to call you at any scheduled point during a date and plays a scripted recording to help you get out of the date. The recording pauses, allowing you to play along with the script and show off your acting skills, which probably aren’t very good because if they were, you would have just made up a plausible excuse to get you out of the date, without requiring a prerecorded voice that your date can’t hear pretending to have a conversation with you.
Here are some examples of the kinds of calls you can get according to Reuters:
“Scripts are available giving the reason for the call, such as a neighbor calling about a leaky pipe; a mother informing that a sister just had a baby; or a boss saying he needs help immediately.”
These ploys may seem like good ideas, until you go on a date with your plumber boss who offers to come with you to fix your neighbor’s leaky pipe, until he remembers that your sister is a baby, because you have a photo of her on your desk at the office.
Perhaps your date isn’t going so well because you picked the wrong wine from the wine list.
Remember, this app is from eHarmony, the company that advertises that if you take its questionnaire to define what you’re looking for, “we’ll help you find the most promising matches.“
Those sound like really promising matches when someone has to schedule a fake phone call to themselves, before the date even begins, to ensure there is a plausible explanation to get out of the date.
The important thing for men out there who may be disappointed that their date received one of these fake telephone calls is to remember it could be worse. Specifically, here are:
3 Worse iPhone Interruptions Your Date Could Get During A Date
1. A call from Miss Manners, a.k.a Judith Martin, reminding your date that it is bad etiquette to use cell phones in restaurants, especially on dates. Oh great, Miss Manners just scolded your date, forcing her to hang up and continue the bad date! Now you have to spend the rest of dinner discovering the other etiquette your date does not know, from talking with food in her mouth, to being clueless about which clock position to put the knife and fork in after she is done eating.
2. A call from Vince, the ShamWow pitchman. And you wondered why he always wears that headset in infomercials. Well, now you know it’s to call your date and spend half an hour pitching her the ShamWow until she finally says “yes”, which she never does. At least until today, when 15-minutes into the call, she spills a bottle of wine on the table and your pants, and orders a ShamWow, which you’ll have to wait four to six weeks for delivery, before the mess can be cleaned up. Enjoy your six-week date in a 24-hour diner wearing wine-covered white jeans! For those of you who are good with fashion and numbers, yes, based on today’s date, that will mean wearing white after Labor Day!
3. A hundred email messages from eHarmony, which cause her iPhone to ding every minute, each asking her to come back to eHarmony after she left the service, and had no success trying to “unsubscribe”. That’s 99 new emails of men that eHarmony thinks she should date instead of you! And one email suggesting she date a leaky pipe, because whether it be online or through it’s new iPhone app, when eHarmony runs out of ideas, it just suggests its users head to the nearest leaky pipe!
