Date & Dash: not very dashing

I went to a speed-dating event this week through a company I’d never tried before: Date & Dash (http://www.dateanddash.com) I think they’re based out of Chicago, but they have expanded and now run events in New York – and this one was FREE! So, what did I have to lose?

Well, I ended up losing faith in Date & Dash, that’s for sure. The event was not well-run. I didn’t receive an e-mail reminder that it was taking place, like I always have with New York Easy Dates (http://www.nyeasydates.com) and Hurry Date (http://www.hurrydate.com). Check-in was supposed to be at 7:30 with the event beginning at 8:00, so I arrived at 7:45. But it ended up not even starting until after 8:30. One of the two hosts had just been asked to take over the event at the last minute, and in the confusion, the forms that we women needed to write down our matches were forgotten. We had to write down our matches on the back of the web site instruction forms. Actually, we had to write them down twice: once for us so we could enter the matches into the web site the next day, and once for the hosts. I don’t really get why. Also, our nametags didn’t have our names on them, only our numbers, so with every date, I had to ask the guy’s name and vice versa.

Considering all of this, the evening was not boding well. But surprisingly enough, I met 15 guys, which I think is the most I’ve ever met at one event. One guy went on and on about how American women are too fickle and too spoiled (for the record, he was American), and how his only faint hope when he attended these events was to find that one-in-a-million woman he could actually stand. But most of the guys I met were really nice and interesting. Bizarrely, one of the guys had grown up in my small hometown in New Jersey, and we went to the same high school -- he graduated just two years behind me! How random is that? I didn't remember him or recognize his name at all, though. Anyway, I chose five guys to see again, which is a high rate for me.

Unfortunately, I may never get the chance. I turned in my form at the end of the night, but when I tried to log in my matches today, the site didn’t recognize my e-mail address. I called the Date & Dash customer service department, and the guy who answered said to re-register. I did that, confirmed my registration, and attempted to log in my matches. But the numbers didn’t match up -- the guys I met had had “assigned dater numbers” of 50 to 70, but the web site only listed 30 to 60. Since three of my matches had numbers higher than 60, I couldn’t log them in. So I put in the two matches that I could. For my trouble, I received -- you guessed it -- another error message. Argh!

I called Date & Dash back, and the same guy answered – makes me wonder if their “customer service department” is actually the founder of the company sitting by himself in his apartment in Chicago. He apologized, saying “they” (read: he, himself & him) were about to send an e-mail to all the participants, explaining that we had been given the wrong party number and that we should subtract 20 from each man’s dater number, since the printer had printed out the wrong numbers last night.

It’s been a couple of hours since I called, and have I received an e-mail? Of course not. Sigh. I would say that I want my money back but, oh yeah, it was a free event. You get what you pay for....