I'm not alone

Apparently, I'm not the only love pariah. Of course I'm not! But what's surprising is how many women have created the same blog. (Sigh) I can't even bask in the creation of a neoteric blog because it's far from unique, it's cliche. As hard as I tried to be tragic, I was in fact constantly reminded of my good fortune with friends popping out of the woodwork to praise me for random things like my great shoes, choice of nail polish and cynical musings.
I had been sharing my plight with various coworkers who only knew me as the freelance field producer who flits in and out of the newsroom every several weeks. One of those colleagues, who will henceforth be known as hot printer guy, was the hot research assistant who sits next to the printer. At the risk of sounding redundant, allow me to elaborate- he's hot and his desk is next to my my assigned printer. What? I said redundant.
Anyway, I had been sharing my trials and tribulations with him regarding the lazy-eyed guy who had dissed me after I checked every don't on the list of dating do's and don't's. Then, in a flash of brilliance or blatant stupidity (for now I'll choose to characterize it as genius), I thought, "why are you putting hot printer guy in the friend zone, HELLO?" So I started flirting with him via email and we ended up going out for drinks. Yes, it's Ramadan, what are you, the Taliban? Add kafir to my list of flaws, see if I care.
We talked for about three and a half hours over vodka tonics and established the following: 1) hot printer guy thought I was hot from day one whereas he popped up on my radar just 24 hours prior to our pseudo-date, 2) hot printer guy is squeamish about office romance, 3) I'm not really inter-office material since I'm usually on the road and rotate desks vacated by staffers who are ooto ('out of the office' for those of you blessed with ignorance of corporate acronyms) and, 4) he was not a 'quick fix.'
At one point, he came dangerously close to kissing me and I leaned in and whispered, "we're not having our first kiss in this bar." He relented and then suggested he kiss me in the rain outside which was romantic but that plan was thwarted by an endless stream of Cliff Claven-esque babble I opted to spout off instead of appearing demure and well, kissable. So then he was going to kiss me in the subway station and that was just sordid so we decided to wait until our first date. That was Thursday and despite my less than subtle attempts at discovering when that date may come ("so when are we going out?" I know. CRINGE), I still don't know. I just don't know. But I'm going to play by the rules. Stand-by for upcoming update on how long that sadly doomed plan will last.