In which I make the mistake of talking to my boss about my love life even though it's obvious he is interested in me and then he asks me out

After I finished grad school and before the Peace Corps, I did temp work.

For one assignment, I was sent to Big Computer Company, which was testing their user manuals, although you would never have known it to read one. The manager gave me a series of tasks and the manual, then observed through a two-way mirror as I worked.

One of my tasks was to add a hard drive to a computer. I looked at the appropriate instructions, discovered they were crap, literally* tossed the manual back over my shoulder, and figured out how to install the hard drive on my own.

When the manager, Mark, was debriefing me, I told him that his problem was that the people writing the manuals were techies who already understood the process so well that they didn't know how to explain it to non-techies, much like the full professors teaching freshman chemistry. They have forgotten what it's like not to know.

Techies also think the rest of us should learn the hard way because once we do, it's so much easier. That's my brother's rationale for DOS versus Windows. Really! Just go through the hassle of learning DOS because once you've committed forever to understanding it, it's a piece of cake.

No thanks. I want something that is easy and intuitive from the start. The beginning of marketing a product is appealing to the user's laziness.

I also pointed out that the writing was not good. What you need, I told him blithely, is someone like me: someone who knows nothing about your product but who knows how to write and who will include instructions such as, "Now hit 'Enter.'"

I was hired (as a temp) for $15/hour, which was not too shabby for temp work, especially in 1993.

I soon discovered that much of my job was hanging out with Mark, a sweet, slightly nerdy (which is OK), 37-year-old Mormon virgin who had taken all the classwork for a PhD in psychology but had not written a dissertation. His job was to run the testing lab at BCC. There wasn't enough work, so after I would spend a few excruciatingly dull hours alone in a conference room editing manuals and then putting the changes into the electronic file, which was on the mainframe and for which one needed to use HTML because BCC was not going to be caught dead using Microsoft products, no matter how much their own product stank in comparison, Mark would find me and we would gab.

I asked him all about Mormons and why couldn't he have caffeine. He told me that it wasn't necessarily a restriction against caffeine but against stimulating beverages, which some in the church maintained were hot beverages and others maintained were caffeinated ones. Still, this did not put the church into schism as the one cuppers and the two cuppers of the Church of Christ have seen happen, so it must not have been an essential difference. What it meant for Mark was cases of 7 Up in his office that he got at Sam's Club.

The soda worked well to wash down the ranch flavored corn nuts that he also bought by the case and had stacked precariously behind his desk.

We talked about the Jesus Jammies. He was not so eager to discuss theories of the jammies or even tell me what they looked like** but I'm sure he was intrigued and perhaps convinced at my suggestion that the man who originally came up with the idea also happened to find himself the owner of a factory that made underwear.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my friend Laura had set me up with an acquaintance from work. I had gone out with this guy once or twice, but he wasn't as interested in me as I was in him. He went out of town one weekend and returned to tell me that he had been in San Francisco with another woman.

She is beautiful, he told me, but I can talk to you.

I took that about as well as any normal woman would.

I shared all the acquaintance drama with Mark. All the, He loves me, He loves me not baloney that insecure, low self esteem women do when A Man Is Not Calling. The proper response, of course, is To Go On With Your Life, but I was young and stupid back then and made many, many mistakes.

Mark was interested and wanted to know more. This was OK. We were just friends, right? I had sensed some interest, but he was my boss. He would never do anything unprofessional.

Like ask me out.

So I kept telling him all my romantic woes and he kept sympathizing and I didn't get a whole lot of work done, although I got done all the work Mark gave me. It was boring. Mark was not so busy either. We goofed off together and nobody saw us because BCC was housed in a building with passkey-only grim gray hallways and hidden offices. In my time there, I saw only three other employees once I was past the lobby.

Contrast this to 3M, where I had had another temp assignment. Their building was open and airy with whiteboards and markers at every hall intersection to encourage the engineers to collaborate whenever possible.

Guess which company has had more innovation?

Back to Mark.

After Acquaintance and I decided there wasn't enough room for both our egos in a relationship, I told Mark it was Over.

He promptly asked me out.

Actually, what he said was that he was kinda interested in maybe hanging out with me and did I want to go out to supper sometime?

And in one of the dumbest career moves of all time, I told him no.

Seriously. How bad would it have been to go out to eat with a 37-year-old Mormon virgin? He'd already made it clear that he was not going to marry outside his faith (we had talked about the lack of hot Mormon girls in the area) and if he'd made it to 37 intacta, he probably wasn't going to blow it now. Plus I had only two months to go and I could have pretended to be a Nice Girl who doesn't sleep with men before marriage. One dinner a week to keep a $15/hour job?

I was a fool.

He wasn't.

I got a call from the temp agency the next day. BCC no longer required my services.



* When I say "literally," I mean "I really and truly did the thing I said," not "figuratively."

** I know now because of Big Love.