What’s In A Number?

When re-telling the events of an evening, without fail there’s always one specific, stand-out headline moment. It’s the plot twist that makes sure who ever is listening is paying attention, from ‘then we went back to their hotel… and literally helped them iron their shirts’ to ‘and that’s when it became apparent we were in a bikie bar’, whether it’s ‘a top hat is akin to a man with a baby’, or ‘he emerged from the fray, took one look at us and said “you’re next”, so we ran’.

So it’s a testament to my shocking run with romance that the headline moment from a recent raucous Saturday evening* that most of my friends seem to have taken away is ‘and then I got a guy’s phone number’. I want to be outraged that this shocked people… but truly, it was such a foreign happening it took me a while to recall it occurred at all.


He was lounging in nothing but a towel. I was wearing a top hat (it’s a wardrobe staple), a large novelty bow tie and brandishing a giant candy cane cane. Having lost my conversation cue cards a few beverages earlier, I wasn’t exactly in sparkling form.

Sample dialogue:

Painefull: So what do you do?
Towel Man: I’m a doctor.
Painefull: (EXPLETIVE) off!

There were 3 very good reasons I wasn’t going be calling that number.

1. I had no idea what his name was.

2. I couldn’t be sure through the alcohol haze what he actually looked like.

3. Even if he was attractive, I know I wasn’t, given my rapid decline as the party progressed.

As an unashamed spinster-in-waiting the above 3 points are both infallible and insurmountable to me. Add to this the fact that I pretty much forced my phone into the man’s hands and slurred that he should type his number in – is it really getting someone’s number if it borders on assault? As an extra special bonus reason, I would have given someone in my state the wrong digits, so why wouldn’t he?

Case closed.

Fi, Sammy and my new housemate Layla disagree. Apparently I’m meant to make that awkward, vanity-killing, mortification producing call. Isla, who currently has excess time on her hands, took it a step further. She Miss Marple-d her way through Facebook and has actually emerged with a possible candidate for the mystery Towel Man (largely because, “I just want to see what you’re last name would be if you married him”). Isla’s sustained arguments knew no bounds.

Isla: Please call him, please! He could be my husband, did you think of that?

These pleas were thankfully easy to resist. I’m sorry phantom Towel Man, it’s just not mean to be. In fact if either of us were actually capable of recognizing each other on the street I’d eat my top hat.


Painefull Out

* = An evening in which people were thrown into a pool, I injured myself while dancing with a giant cane and one poor cab driver wishes to forget entirely.