Dry Clean Dating

Sometimes things happen to you that you had previously thought absent from real life, and these, of course, at the most inopportune moments. One winter evening after work and following a good old sweat in the gym, I emerged from the shower in the flat, dripping and towel-clad, to catch the dying ringtone of my mobile. Once in my slippery wet grip, I was able to spot that this wasn’t a number I recognised and, out of intrigue, phoned straight back. A young lady answered and sounded bewildered.

“Did you just ring this phone?” I asked, cutting straight to the point.

After some hesitation, the girl mustered confirmation. “Is now a good time?” was her next question.

“Depends what for,” I said, in little or no mood for telesales at this point in time.

“I’m sorry,” she went on, “I don’t even know your first name.” I then very cruelly left an awkward pause which she filled with, “I feel so bad – I’ve stolen your number from your receipt.” Alarm bells started to ring and my emergency guard began to go up. This was all a little too invasive for my taste - what was going on? “You know the dry cleaner’s?” she asked, I confirmed. “You know the girl in the dry cleaner’s? Well this is her.”

I had been in the previous week with a number of items: suit trousers on whose crotch I had spilled tuna oil and also my formal suit which needed vomit removing from the sleeves after the work Christmas party. The establishment was only across the road and therefore my cleaner of choice, by dint of proximity alone. Run by a delightful Jewish matriarch, a flatmate and I had been in there for a while, making friends with the staff and eschewing questions about what the stains were on my formal suit. “Don’t worry,” the matriarch had said, “I know how you young boys like to party at Christmas”. When I had stopped by one evening to collect the trousers, now free of the fishy stain over the fly (the formal suit was, understandably, to take longer), the girl, who had also been there the previous time, had served me as I shelled out my cash. As I was departing she had suddenly said, “Nice jumper.”

Taken aback by this abrupt comment, I had responded, “Oh thanks – I work in a cold office,” before heading off, giving her outburst no further thought.

And now she was phoning me from the number I had written on my receipt in case there had been problems cleansing my formal suit of the company bartab regurgitated. “Oh yes, I know who you are,” I said to her.

“Well I was just wondering, er, if you would maybe, um, like to go for a coffee some time.”

I weighed up the situation in an instant. She was a sweet girl, brave enough to ring me out of the blue, but she had thieved my number unprofessionally and I felt very vulnerable standing there in a towel and a smile. “I’m sorry, I have a girlfriend,” I found myself saying, before finishing things off with a conciliatory “take care” and hanging up.

Confused, I strolled into the sitting room to share the experience with the flatmates. They all laughed and told me I was horrible, apart from the one who had come to the dry cleaner’s with me in the first place, who asked, “Why didn’t she want to steal my number and phone me for a date?”