I went to a speed date event last night. It was pretty terrible. A local country station was advertising a speed dating event at a local Harley Davidson dealership, and they were going to give away two tickets to a Kid Rock Concert, a limo for the night, and dinner and drinks at some local restaurant.

I expected an interesting turnout, because those combinations of interests sounded like a fun intersection of people. I'm 32, and I think the average age for the women was 45.

55 women signed up for the event, and 20 some men. When the event started, 15 of the women actually showed up, but 25 men were there. I was seriously disappointed, but I kept my spirits up, and hoped that I could make a good enough impression on some of the older women so that they would introduce me to their daughters. :P

Having such a short time, it's really hard to even make a first impression.

There was free time before the event started, they had us milling around for an hour, I think they wanted us to look at the bikes, and maybe come back to buy one. Most of the people who had signed up for the event came in and joined little clusters of same gender groups. I approached a few groups of women and introduced myself and said something like, "Wow, you know it's weird, everyone's here for speed dating, so you'd think everyone wants to meet someone, but still everyone breaks up into same sex groups. It's like high school all over again." The common response I got was, "Yeah, well maybe you should go introduce yourself to them." To which I would make some small talk, and then move on to another set. But it's weird that they would say that. The way I took it was, "Yeah, go away." But I tried not to let it affect my mood.

I started out with, "Hi, my name's _uatu_." <offer hand> "I'll show you mine if you show me yours. I'm 32." <wait for her to respond with age> "I've been in <city> for <x> years." <wait> "In my free time I like to <activity>." Then try to make a conversation on their response to activity, if they don't ask me questions about the activity I gave them. Then it's basically time to move to the next.

Seriously, I think the youngest woman I met was 38, and the hottest was a 6, with the average being 3. The radio station made 2-3 of the women who were running the event get into the mix, just because there were so few women there.

All in all, I met some interesting people, but the event itself was exhausting, and I was highly mismatched with the demographics of the women there. Finally, I didn't even win the tickets, so I couldn't scalp them.