Chapter 2

After logging out of the dating site, I walked Max slowly around the block to give the shade of Walt Disney one final chance at a fairytale romance; but nothing doing. I guessed that he and Cupid were taking a break after all those Christmas engagements. Not a sniff of love for me; unlike my companion.

Max didn’t notice the lack of eligible females rushing our way because, as usual, he was too interested doing his doggie CSI bit of tracking everybody – and especially every canine – who’d been trespassing on his sidewalk since our last patrol. One final lift of his leg against our gateway to make his mark, and he was prancing proudly up our driveway, as proud as if he owned the place. Hmmm. I bet in the City of the Angels he’d be able to find a lawyer who could persuade a judge to put it in his name, too. Better not give him any ideas.

I gave him his bedtime snack, checked I still had all my fingers (what do they put in these dog treats? – no, rhetorical question, I don’t want to know), locked up the house, did my evening routine in the bathroom, and climbed into my lonely bachelor bed.

I fell asleep with two things on my mind – first, had I just made a complete fool of myself by posting my profile on the dating site?, and second, exactly how bad was work going to be in the morning?

Only time would tell on the first; what was done was done. The chick-flick favorite scenario of two pairs of eyes meeting across a crowded room, love at first sight, hadn’t happened. Which was why I’d had to resort to advertising. Did that make me a loser? I didn’t think so; by doing the honorable – and sensible – thing and avoiding any relationships at work, I’d cut off most avenues of finding someone. So it was only right to build another way of getting myself out there where I’d find Miss Right. Exactly what the next step would be if this dating site turned out to be a bust, I had no idea. My romantic future was in what Dad refers to as the ‘lap of the gods’. I could do no more at present. So no point fretting.

Regarding the second, after the break, there were bound to be some urgent staffing issues that had arisen over the weekend; the Christmas and New Year period seems to shake up a lot of people from their accustomed routine. I’ve read somewhere that the first full week of January is the big one for enquiries about divorce, as being together 24/7 for the holidays often crystalizes the reasons why one (or both) of the partners wants out. At least in California we rarely have the winter weather that makes things even worse elsewhere. Can you imagine being snowed in for days with someone you’ve decided you can’t stand to be with another moment, but neither of you can leave? Jeez, maybe you’d be better taking your chances with the blizzard raging outside.

Actually, I slept well. I taught myself a long time back not to worry about something that I couldn’t influence, just to deal with it to the best of my ability when it did come up. Still, I promised myself that I’d never take a job near the Great Lakes. It was bad enough watching the ice-storm pictures on the network news. SoCal may have its disadvantages; freezing weather isn’t one of them.

Monday January 4, 2016, I’d only been in the office ten minutes when the first call from HR came in warning me that the advertising budget for recruitment was about to take a big hit as they launched another campaign of job ads in the professional magazines. It’s not like you can mess around once a couple of vital ER staff have told you that they’re quitting; someone else needs to be there for the very next shift after they leave, so the vacancy gets posted the very same day. It’s one of the necessities; a false economy not to fill the job as fast as you can. A lot of businesses take a resignation as a chance to delay recruitment, make others fill in, and save some on the payroll; you just cannot do that with essential posts. And most certainly not when lives and health are at stake, litigation-crazy society or not. I would be incandescently angry if one of my parents was taken into hospital only to have treatment delayed because of shortage of staff, so I wasn’t intending for that to happen to someone else’s parents on my watch. No Sir.

You know what percentage the medical staffing agencies take off the top for providing temporary staff? No, actually, you don’t want to know. Trust me. It’s outrageous, absolutely outrageous, even with the extras like sick pay and personal days they cover, or claim to cover. Modern day highway robbery. Up there with loan sharks and legal sharks. That’s why we’re constantly advertising and recruiting our own directly-employed workforce, and why one of my main job priorities is reducing the unnecessary turnover of people.

No, the New Year is never one of the best weeks at work; there’s way too much reactive firefighting and not enough forward planning. At least the procedures I’d put in place for rapid response advertising seemed to be working. It was quite the relief to get to the weekend without a major crisis. I liked to think it was skill rather than luck, but, being brutally honest, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it might have been. I’d only failed to get away from the office on time twice in five days.

Friday evening after supper, I grabbed myself a well-deserved craft beer to sip, went back to the dating site and logged in. Max settled down under my chair, and my profile page loaded. Jeez! I already had forty-six messages! How many were serious replies, I just didn’t know. The oldest two were from the site admin, but the rest were from other members. I scrolled through the previews and thumbnails; one I deleted immediately (I kinda worry when a woman shows me her pussy on first meeting), others I went into, to see what they had to say. That got a few more of them deleted; I’d been quite clear that I was on this site because I wanted to settle down and raise a family, and the offers of casual sex and FWB arrangements weren’t of any interest. I guessed that some people were using this as a higher-class hook-up rendezvous, looking for pre-screened partners whose real identities were known to the site, making it far safer than something like Tinder. Most of the photos were selfies; they didn’t always flatter the sitter, and in some of them you could see enough of their home to know that they weren’t fully housetrained. Gee, you’d think you might actually have made the bed up if you were sitting on it while taking a photo of yourself in the mirror? Had she not looked at the picture before uploading it? And these people had the spare cash to pay the subscription fee? If one of my staff had been that slap-dash, their supervisor would be having a quiet word in their ear.

Mr Picky? Damn right. I’m an administrator. They pay me to pay attention to the detail, to ensure that things go right first time. That’s why I check every document that I initial or sign. That’s why I stroll around the hospital looking for clues that something is off. If a storeroom, office or dispensary is untidy, then it’s likely that the inventory, data security or control procedures are also less than perfect. In my world, cleanliness and order are pretty close to godliness; they have to be. It runs over into my private life; I just try not to let it take over completely. Obsessive-Compulsive? Maybe a little, but hey, nobody’s perfect.

That’s almost enough about me; you want to know how I decided who to get back to first out of all those replies, don’t you?

The first cut was age. After more consideration, knowing that I hoped to have children of my own blood, I’d set my preferred age-range as 27-32; that probably ruled out a few more respondents who’d left it too late on the biological clock. Some of the ladies had chanced it anyway (one admitted to 38), and a couple more got canned who I reckoned from their profiles were maybe still too, uh, young at heart to settle down. That got the number down to twenty-eight.

I next had to make an instant decision that I hadn’t anticipated – a whole lot of the ladies who’d replied were divorced or widows, rather than single. How would I take being compared to an ex? Did I want to take on a woman who already had kids? I reckoned not this first time around; I might miss out on someone who was truly amazing, but to start with, I wanted someone I could get to really know without interruptions. It was a difficult decision; there were some definitely attractive possibilities out there – one set of kids looked totally cute and adorable – but in the end I concluded that I could revisit those profiles at a later date if the first pick didn’t work. Getting an instant family didn’t sit too well with my instinctive wish to pass on MY genes to the next generation.

I now had the long list of those who claimed to be 27-32 years old, single, childless and never married. Still eleven of them. Still too many. How to reduce it to a manageable short list?

Some of the ladies profiles and photos made me suspect that they might be a little ... high-maintenance; I made myself a mental note that I’d have to be wary of that. Los Angeles has a problem in that people seem to be even more status-conscious than what passes for ‘normal’ in these celebrity-obsessed days. For thousands of Angelenos – not all, but a worrying percentage – it absolutely matters where they are seen dining, what cars they drive, the label on their designer outfits, who they hang out with. You’ve heard of the LA Power Couple lists? I’d die if I ever got included with that clique, though I strongly suspected that it was Marsha’s ambition to be part of that crowd. Which was another reason why we didn’t work out.

LA has a uniqueness all of its own; it’s a concrete jungle, polluted, over-crowded, as fake as the movie sets ... and still utterly amazing. I like looking at the California beach bunnies and bimbos, and grinning to myself whenever I see an obvious trophy wife or professional mistress, but I’d never in a million years want to go out with any of them. I’m not made that way. I can’t keep up the pretense of smooching with people who have no obvious redeeming features. One of my college professors told me that I don’t suffer fools gladly, an old-fashioned way of saying that I can’t abide assholes.

Oh, I can kiss ass if I really, really need to. Some egos are indispensable, and if it takes flattery and sucking up to achieve my goal, I can do it. Just like I can play the hatchet man if somebody needs firing with prejudice. I don’t like it, it’s not me, but it has to be done. If I couldn’t put on the act when required, I wouldn’t be doing my job properly. However, socially, these days I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. I learned that the hard way, from squiring Marsha to a whole succession of events and places SHE wanted to go; she taught me to be a little more selfish and assertive in my personal relationships.

Like I said, I earn a great wage, but nowhere near the top of the LA scale. I’m never gonna be able to compete with trust fund kids or those pulling down millions of dollars a year – even if I wanted to, which I don’t.

For way too many people in La La Land, money is easy-come, easy-go. They’ve absolutely nothing in common with ordinary Americans living their lives outside the Los Angeles County bubble. Which is exactly why it’s called La La Land. Heck, they’ve little enough to do with the vast majority of Angelenos who have to WORK for a living. Some of these people have gotten their money the old-fashioned way, by inheriting it. Most have almost stumbled into it, by the luck of being in the right place at the right time with a stock flotation, a tech start-up, or ‘show-business’ of some kind or another. What amazed me when I first came here was the number of ‘ordinary’ professionals – lawyers, accountants, doctors, business people – who were living multi-millionaire life-styles. Yeah, back in Atlanta, the top doctors at the hospitals I worked in did drive around in expensive European imports, did live in mansions, frequent exclusive country clubs and appear in the society pages, but nowhere near the level out here. Jeez, I’ve seen restaurant wine lists where the top half of the page showed nothing under $750 a bottle! Who pays that kind of money? For most Americans that’s much more than a week’s pay, and yet some people drink it just to be seen doing so!

It’s not quite as bad as burning fifty-dollar bills in front of homeless people, but it’s on the way. Conspicuous consumption. No class. They’re all assholes.

I’ve actually earned my money by working hard for it; while I’m not mean with buying gifts and treats for my friends and family, I don’t fritter it away. I’m more than solvent, and I’d like to stay that way. I don’t see myself staying on the West Coast forever; and I’m intending to retire while I’m still young enough to have a whole lot of fun with my time. (That was another reason for getting on with starting a family of my own – who in their right mind wants to be eligible for Social Security but still working full time to pay off the kids’ college tuition fees?)

A girlfriend who can spend money faster than I can earn it has never been part of my master plan. I remember at High School and college how some of the hottest-looking girls were the most self-centered and money-conscious. Sometimes being naturally beautiful can be more of a curse than a blessing, I’d known some girls who genuinely believed that they were entitled to only the very best, just because they were lucky with their genetic make-up. Los Angeles seems to attract that type, the Homecoming Queens who just KNOW that as soon as an agent sees their photo land on his desk, he’ll be throwing money, stardom and the Hollywood lifestyle their way, because, after all, it’s no less than they deserve. Sometimes it works out for them, most often it don’t. They might be the marrying kind, but I’m saying that in the sense of serial marriages, serial divorces, and serial settlement payments. Nope, not for me.

So, using my recruitment and resume assessment skills, and a little bit of instinct, I’d finally achieved a short list of the half dozen single women who seemed to be both on my wavelength, and close enough geographically to meet up; and I responded to their messages with a request for a date...