ER Confessions...

Nope, not those types of confessions, but thanks for the blog traffic!

So back in the old days, when yours truly was a newly minted 23 y/o ambulance driver, I couldn't find anybody who wanted me to drive their ambulance!  A girl that I had met while doing clinical rotations (and later ended up dating for two years) introduced me to her boss at the local Emergency Department and I managed to get hired on as an ER Technician.  For the next two years, I spent my time between that ER and school. The best year of it was spent working overnights 7pm to 7am.  We had the best crew possible, and often saw serious cases, especially Cardiac Arrests and Trauma.  I learned some of the most valuable lessons and saw some of the most critical patients long before I ever learned how to start an IV, calculate and push meds or intubate anything.  (I can now do all four simultaneously, underwater, standing on my head, while smoking a cigarette...Trust me...)  Back in the year 2000 we didn't see the ludicrous number of patients that they do today, and we could usually have the ER cleared and the last patient discharged by no later than 2am.  I was usually done with all of my cleaning, stocking and reorganizing duties by about 3 or 4am which left a minimum of 3 hours to kill every night.  1 Doctor, 3 Nurses, 2 Paramedics, 1 ER tech and 1 Coordinator with nothing to do for 3 hours...That, ladies and gentlemen is called a recipe for disaster!  We ate dinner, watched movies, read books and studied...which still left us at least another 90 min!  That time was occupied with wheelchair races, stretcher jousting, prank creation for the day shift, nitro shot contests, ghost hunting in the basement of the hospital, flirting with the nurses aides upstairs and exploration of that still fairly new toy-the internet.  

Our favorite internet hobby was scouring the only free dating website of the day Yahoo!-Personals

We wasted many an hour looking for cute women, watching the girls looking for cute guys and most importantly looking as hard as possible for people we worked with or knew in the hospital so that we could print their entire profile and post it in no less than 50 different locations throughout the facility...I know, I know, its a jerk move.  However, if you tell the truth in your personal ad, you shouldn't have anything to fear right?  We, were, ruthless! and let me tell you, we found a lot of fake people.  Nurse aides who online were suddenly Nurse Practitioners, Nurses who could give "Nurse Ratchet" a run for her money were suddenly "loving and dedicated caregivers" whose only fault was "caring too much".  Paramedics who called themselves "Doc", and quite often EMT's who used the term "medic" like it wasn't supposed to imply "Paramedic" (a cardinal sin in EMS).  People grew 2 inches and lost 30 lbs.  They forgot to mention the hairy mole on their chin, the 3 years they did in the army driving trucks was suddenly classified as "I'm not really supposed to talk about it!"  and maybe most importantly they forgot that they got divorced because they were sleeping with half the town! and suddenly they were "sincerely seeking a loving and trusting long term relationship".-Yeah Right.  We weren't "being jerks", we were "ridding the world of online predators!"  At least that's how we saw it.

12 years later it looks like things have changed...a little.  With the advent of eharmony, match.com and POF it seems the internet dating scene might have improved.   2 years ago in grad school I gave a presentation on POF, prior to the project, I had never heard of such a thing.  I was happily married and had no reason to go exploring the personals.  For the project we created a fake profile (which was deleted by the company within 48 hours) and took the class through the technology and future possibilities for POF.  My main role in the project was to present the idea to the class, which I'm good at and did well in a dynamic way.  The majority of the class denied having ever used such websites and expressed serious hesitation to changing their opinion that online dating was for "other people".  One of the scenarios I gave that did seem to sway some people was a 50 y/o divorced female executive.  Her job and age would prevent her from dating in many of the traditional senses.  Her best bets would be her Church and a referral from a friend.  Both of those have the potential of going very bad.  POF would be perfect for her.  Imagine she lives in a metropolitan area of 200k people.  60% of those will be outside her desired age bracket (40-55) leaving 80k, 50% of those will be married leaving 40k, only 50% of those will try online dating at some point leaving us 20k people.  Now out of that 20k we can whittle it down by education level, children, political views, etc...There is a perfectly reasonable expectation that out of a 200k metro area we can find 100-500 people that meet this woman's desires and expectations in a date or a mate.  She will then be able to pick the ones that seem most alluring to her and safely chat away trying to find the best possibles.  This has always been the expectation with online dating, but in the latter half of 2012 when computers are online more often than not, and we use the internet to book our trips, pay our bills, read our news, listen to our music, map our roads, find a doctor, go to school. and we use smart phones to keep us connected when not on our computers,  I'm beginning to think that this isn't such a ridiculous idea.  Its certainly no more ridiculous than going to a bar or dancing and hoping to meet Mr or Mrs. right.  Or hoping that out of the 10 single women who are age appropriate at your church you're going to find "the one".

This post came because my ex-wife says I need to "move on".  I'm half tempted to tell her that she doesn't want to see that reality, because it might not involve me overseas making big money anymore.  In fact, it very well might involve me packing the truck, grabbing the dogs and heading back West or anyplace nice I find along the way.  

Moving on...I wonder if this online dating shit works half as well as I sold it to my classmates. 

Oh, and as always your comments and thoughts on this one are welcome!