sometime in January 2000
Just the other day I got stood up. It was my boyfriend's birthday, and he and I were going to watch some movies and celebrate. I showed up and he wasn't there. I called, and he wasn't there. Three days later, I still haven't heard from him. Did he go on a vacation and not tell me? Did he dump me? Did he forget utterly? Was there a family emergency? Is he dead? C'mon, guys, I know you don't like using the phone, but if you must break a date, at least tell her so she doesn't get stood up in a public place.
There she is, after two hours of hard makeup work, looking her best, with your birthday present clutched in her hand. She arrived fifteen minutes early. She doesn't want to miss this date.
"Hi, gorgeous. What's your sign?" asks the guy who's seen her standing there for twenty minutes.
"Buzz off. I'm waiting for my boyfriend."
"Boyfriend? I don't see any boyfriend."
"He's coming any minute now."
half an hour later
"I still don't see any boyfriend. Either you're bullshitting me or you got majorly stood up."
"That would be option B," she says, a note of annoyance in her voice.
"You wanna go get a drink or something?"
The steps to prevent this scenario from coming true are simple. If she'd known you weren't going to be there, she wouldn't have been waiting for you for an hour. Being stood up is bad enough. Being stood up in a public place, with witnesses, is humiliation. Any girl who has waited an hour for a guy when he said he would be there on time may feel compelled to some minor act of revenge. If you hadn't stood her up, she wouldn't be feeling vengeful, and she certainly would not have met the guy that she's out having a soda and fries with right now.
A Few Simple Steps to Break a Date
1. Call her to let her know you can't make it.
2. Leave a message with her father.
3. Leave a message with her mother.
4 Leave a message with her bratty little brother, on the off-chance it might get through.
5. Leave a message on her answering machine.
6. Page her.
7. Leave a message on her voicemail.
8-13. Send an e-mail to her work account, her school account, her Hotmail, Juno, and Yahoo accounts, and maybe one to her parents' account just in case it's them on the Internet clogging up the phone line.
14. Call her best friend and leave a message there.
Damn! That's busy too.
15. Call her best friend's boyfriend Peter, because he has call waiting.
No, that wasn't him on the phone with Marie.
16. Search through the phone book for her neighbors to see if any of them are home so they could go knock on the door and tell her that her boyfriend is trying to call, please get off the Internet.
17. Explain the situation briefly to her neighbor's answering machine.
Uh...
You know, if you're going to make this emergency flight to Georgia to say goodbye to your dying grandfather, you're going to have to leave in ten minutes, and the MP3 that your girlfriend must be downloading could take two more hours, and Marie can talk the ear off a lawyer.
18. Call your best buddy Mitch and give him your girlfriend's number and instructions to call her every five minutes until he gets through.
19. Leave a message on his machine stating the dire urgency of the situation. 
20. Leave a second message on his machine with your girlfriend's number, which you forgot to leave the first time.
Grab a toothbrush, deodorant, a complete change of clothes and an extra set of socks and underwear and hop in the car.
Drive half a mile, go back, turn off the stove and lights, grab your tickets, and lock the door behind you.
21. Drive to the airport and try calling her again from there.
22. Try Peter again, and tell him to call her.
Take off your belt with the large buckle and your steel-toed shoes before going through the metal detector.
Put on your belt and shoes before getting on the airplane.
Get on the airplane. You still have your tickets and clothes and shaving kit, right?
Find your seat, and evict the grouchy-looking woman in the Sith Lords Kick Ass shirt. Upon closer inspection, the blurry printing on her ticket reveals that her seat is actually the one next to yours.
Buckle yourself in, review the in-flight safety information, nurse your bruises, and thank your lucky stars that there were only a few bags in the becursed overhead bin.
23. Whip out your credit card and try out the AirFone.
24. Maybe the one across the aisle; yours is broken.
Wait for four hours while the crew discovers that the cabin pressure sensor is broken, and a replacement part and specialist to install it must be flown in from the closest major city. Chew your nails and borrow a computer printout from the lady next to you, who has gone beyond grouchy somewhere into bemused.
Read the very odd and demented Star Wars story and give it back politely, wondering what the hell the two guys were doing with the spatula anyway.
Listen to the nice flight attendant give the presentation on airplane safety and that the last problem was merely a delayed Y2K fluke, and not pilot error as the newspapers libelously reported.
25. Ask the nice flight attendant if the "no phones" thing applies to the built-in phones.
Decide that you'd rather wait until the plane is fully in the air and has leveled off some before using the phone.
Ask the lady in the Sith Lords Kick Ass T-shirt and the Jedi Do Not Concern Me hat if she would please pass the barf-bag.
26. After you are through with your motion discomfort, thank the nice lady in the Sith Lords Kick Ass shirt and call your girlfriend.
27. Smile politely at the busy signal and call Mitch to leave a less out-of-breath explanation of why you had to break the date, with all the important bits not left out.
28. Talk to his answering machine.
29. Make sure you have said everything you have to say before his answering machine runs out of tape half an hour later.
Call up Marie's boyfriend and see if your pager is out of range yet.
Cool! It isn't! Page him back with the airfone-thingy.
30. Try your girlfriend again.
Still busy!
Play a little tune with the keys on the phone.
31. Notice that your pocket is buzzing.
It's your pager again. 
32. Your girlfriend's number.
33. Call her.
34. Hey, it's ringing!
35. Ask her if Mitch got through to her. Ask if Peter got through to her. Ask her if Marie got through to her. Explain the situation with your grandfather. Listen as she tells you about her little brother's Quake addiction and how he set up her computer downloading a bootleg version of the entire thing, plus lots of nifty plug-ins, right before she left for Marie's house to begin the pre-date enthusiasm session.
36. After you're through talking, answer the page from Mitch that got through just as you were leaving your pager's effective range.
37. Remind yourself that you and Mitch will still be friends after Mitch forgives you for filling up his answering machine so his girlfriend in Australia couldn't leave a message when she called.
38. Pray to whatever Power you believe in that your girlfriend will forgive you for breaking the date; you tried everything; it's really not your fault!
Girls: emergencies can and do happen, even on the night of a special date. Forgive, remember, and always have a contingency plan. And kick your little brother's butt for tying up the phone line like that. It's not polite to give your boyfriend a headache if he does do the gentlemanly thing and tells you he's ditching the date. His excuse may actually be true.
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