Funniness As Distraction

This kick-ass picture came from here. The picture is titled "Booty Call". How funny is that??

I just got some potentially bad news from a friend of mine. I can't deal with it right now, so I thought it would be a good time for a funny story.


As I mentioned recently, internet dating can introduce you to some interesting characters. (Wow, that was a lot of 'i' words for one sentence!) This seems like a good time to tell about one of the other more unusual ones from that time in my life.

As I mentioned before, I was on a church-based dating site. One night, I was browsing around the site searching for Mr Right when I had an instant message pop up - from a woman. Uh......

This person kept saying things like I looked like a very nice person and I was pretty, etc. Disturbing to say the least. After some probing questions, the person on the other end of the conversation explained that he was not a woman. His sister had let him log in on her account to check out the site in order for him to decide if he wanted to join. (That would have been helpful information BEFORE commenting that I was pretty, don't ya think??)

I can't for the life of me remember his name right now, so I'll just call him "David".

David had apparently found what he was looking for in me because he never did join the site. He was odd, but didn't seem dangerous, so I allowed him to contact me via email. We sent emails back and forth, and sometimes we would chat via instant message. He told me he lived in Ghana. Odd, but... okay. He claimed to work for a company that had offices in the US, so that explained why his written English was almost perfect. He sent me pictures of himself. Some of them were from the 90's, so that was strange. Eventually, he asked for my phone number.

*By this point, I definitely found the whole thing a little fishy. The claim of being from Ghana always made me think of those scams where you're supposed to send money to some Nigerian prince. The first time he called me, the claim of being from Africa was pretty much verified. His accent was extremely thick, and I had a difficult time understanding him.

I kept waiting for the bomb to drop. Somewhere along the line, he was going to ask me for money.

After a while, he dropped the L word on me. I almost laughed myself silly on the other side of my computer screen. Here it comes, I thought! The money question. Is he going to ask me to pay for a trip to come see me? Is his sister trapped somewhere, needing the funds to get home? What's the game here?

Nothing. Still no catch to this odd game. This little "romance" wasn't costing me anything more than my regular monthly internet and cell phone bills. I was driving myself a little crazy trying to figure out where all this was going to go.

Then one day, he announced he was coming to the US for business! He was going to be working in Alaska, and he was hoping to be able to try to fly in to Montana to see me. He even called me from Alaska one day. It was a different phone than I was used to, and when I asked him about it, he said it was his boss' cell phone. (He had told me earlier that his boss was from back east somewhere - I forget.)

But when I did a reverse phone number search online, the number was a land line in Georgia.

He never did come see me, and the next time I talked to him, he'd gone back to Ghana. He was sorry he hadn't been able to squeeze a trip to Montana in before he had to go back. This went on for months. Nothing. No asking for money. No other scam of any kind. I knew he was full of crap, but what KIND of crap??

Eventually, Surfer Pirate and I started seeing each other exclusively, and I told David that I didn't want him to contact me anymore.

I still have no idea what that was all about.