Escape My Date – When Blind Dates Require a Bailout
Bailouts aren’t just for big financial institutions and Detroit anymore. Now, when you’re on a blind date and you just need to get out of it, there’s EscapeMyDate.com. This might be the coolest idea the Web has ever produced. Except maybe for the Onion News, but it’s at least a close second.
Now that online dating is not really that unusual and is even socially acceptable, this kind of tool could come in handy much more often. Most of us have been there at one time or another, though. You meet at a restaurant or a coffee shop for a first encounter with a blind date. When he or she arrives, you start hearing Iron Maiden in your head screaming “Run for the hills!”
It’s a simple idea and is based on one of the oldest frat boy tactics in the book. Basically, while on your date, you get a phone call. If the date is going well, you can ignore it or blow the caller off. If the date isn’t going well, you answer it and have an “emergency” to react to and inform your date that you have to cancel.
Easy, quick, and generally believable. Especially if you start the conversation by telling your blind date that you’re a fireman or doctor or something. Or in charge of an entire Google server bank, maybe. Depends on how thick your glasses are, I guess.
At any event, if you don’t respond to the call, people could die. Or at least be seriously disappointed.
The site works pretty simply. You sign in with your Twitter account, create a profile, and ad friends you’d like to be able to phone you to save you during a bad get-together.
The downer is that you have to sneak a direct message from your Twitter account to the site in order to get your “get me out of here” call. Your friends are then notified and if they don’t respond within five minutes, the site just calls you itself automatically.
What I would do is set up an auto-tweet DM to be sent while you’re on your hookup. That way you don’t have to come up with an excuse to need to send a tweet while there with your unlucky date.
For some people, this is definitely a cool idea (or a bad, depending on your situation, I guess).
