How My Husband Invented Computer Dating

~ Bitchy After 60

He wasn’t my husband at the time. He wasn’t even my future husband at the time. He was the Data Centre Manager at the uniform manufacturing and rental company where I worked.

My job was preparing the creative and content for communication pieces. There was a lot of copywriting and cut and paste involved. The creative thought process was my stimulant. It both fed me and kept me awake at night. Part of my duties included sales contest play-by-plays sent out weekly to all the branch locations in Ontario and Quebec. I would take all the sales reports generated by the computer then write a running commentary, much like a sports broadcast, in order to engage all the contest participants across the company. It was the mid 80’s and the only way to do this was to key the report into a terminal networked into the company’s mainframe computer. A machine so massive that it was kept in a separate building known as the Data Centre and had it’s own air-conditioned room.

My weekly trip to the Data Centre was made with Mike, our Sales Guru/Manager, also my partner in crime. Mike and I spent many hours trying to convince our company to think outside the box. What were we thinking? Our company made and rented industrial uniforms. They serviced Canada’s unionized manufacturing sector. You can’t get more tightly squeezed inside the box than that. But we had aspirations; and every week we took those aspirations to the Data Centre where, before I began to write my play-by-play, we would redesign the company on the whiteboard of the boardroom. These organization charts placed capable cartoon characters in significant corporate positions and undid the existing chain of command. Supervising these events was The Doc. Mike had christened him Dr. Doug.

It was The Doc who taught me how to use the text-input terminal to create my updates. He was short, blond and balding, with an award-winning smile that would occasionally make an appearance when he erased our weekly org charts from the whiteboard. He quietly put up with the non-stop antics that Mike and I couldn’t resist partaking in on his watch. And he made sure that my report was received by our branch offices, with all the other computer generated reports, the following morning. It was my first introduction to computers and I found it magical in a way. The same way I found the CMYK printing process magical, and the process of knitting so many different stitches with what were basically two sticks. It sometimes makes me sad these days that we take all this knowledge and technology for granted without any thoughts of the many men and women who spent years making these amazing things happen. There is no more magic. But back then, when The Doc first showed me how to use the terminal, the average person had no idea what computers could do; and, to me, the concept was electrifying. Orgasmic! 

It was just text on a green screen, but I fell in love with that terminal. Not just because of its ability to deliver my report quickly, but also because I could edit on the fly, correct mistakes instantly and get my ideas down as fast as I could think–something I couldn’t do with a pen. I was lefty, the product of a school system with paper angles meant for righties; so I curled my hand awkwardly when I wrote. There was no gliding along my pages. Implements pointed up and away and were dragged with so much pressure that pencil lead broke and ink made puddles that were inevitably smeared by my trailing hand. My writing was so bad that I couldn’t read it myself most of the time. So yes, The Doc introduced me to the magic.

When Mike became disillusioned and left the company, I still showed up at the Data Centre to write my reports, although with far less fanfare and fewer aspirations. The Doc continued to assist and provided me with my own login sequence in case he wasn’t around. That way I could come and go as needed. Then one day this showed up on my log-out screen

Would you be interested in going on a date sometime? 

1. Yes

2. No

Most of the day staff had left, and I had just finished up by selecting Generate Report when the question appeared. I stared at it intensely while my entire body began to feel like it was leaving the room one molecule at a time. They scared the crap out of me. I liked The Doc. He was a nice guy. But I work with The Doc. Would this be appropriate? I’m no good at this dating thing. Why? Why? Why did he do this? But The Doc is a nice guy. I don’t want to hurt his feelings. Think about this, isn’t this kind of romantic? The Doc is a nice guy. So I selected 1.Yes; and with my click of the button, The Doc invented computer dating.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Happy Anniversary Doug!

Thank you for reading. 

Photo: Bob Smithson

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20 thoughts on “How My Husband Invented Computer Dating”

  2. Great story! Doc must have inherited the yes/no technique from some elementary student. Kids occasionally passed notes in my classes. (What? I wasn’t fascinating enough to hold their attention?) I occasionally intercepted these but never humiliated the students by reading the notes aloud, as some teachers did. The one that struck me the funniest was written by a fifth-grade girl to another boy in the class: “Will you go with me until recess? Yes or no?” It was the middle of class. What exactly did she have in mind?🤣🤣🤣

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    1. Thanks. My coworker Mike had christened our go-to guy Dr. Doug because he seemed to be able to solve every computer problem that Mike threw at him. When I started writing, I shortened it to The Doc to give him some anonymity. Just in case he needed to pretend he didn’t know me. 😃

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  8. Lovely wedding photo!

    I started out as a computer operator on those huge mainframes and worked on them for many years. Believe me, if they’d stuck with the green screens, people wouldn’t be having computer-related eyesight problems now as they did no harm whatsoever – unlike today’s computer screens shining blue/white light into your eyes all day! My vision deteriorated within a couple of years of changing to PC/Laptop access.

    I’ve always dated people from work and never gone out with anyone else. 2 reasons for that really – I only get on with technical people. Also, I won’t go out with anyone I don’t know thoroughly. And all that working closely together does bring people together – sometimes inappropriately unfortunately.

    When we got ‘instant messaging’ systems, I used to spend all day flirting with everyone whether I knew them or not – so long as they were the opposite sex. But it was all harmless fun – I wouldn’t have dreamt of taking it further with most of them. That isn’t to say I wasn’t working – I was, but women are great multi-taskers. I used to have around 5 conversations blinking around my screen which were flirty ones and about 5 work-related conversations and would be dealing with all of them. Great fun.

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