When You’re Dating A Blank Tape

It was my birthday and I had planned a fancy dinner party for a few close friends, to celebrate. This was also the night I was going to introduce them to the man I had been dating for a couple of months.

He was supposed to come over a few hours early to help me get everything ready. I didn’t hear from him all day, and when he wasn’t there by three, I texted to see where he was and received no reply. He didn’t show up at all, and there was no word from him until the next day.

I asked him what happened, and he said he didn’t know that the dinner party was on that night, that his phone was out of battery, and that he had missed the last bus to my place. He even said that he would have walked the three hours it would have taken, but he had my birthday present with him and it was too big and heavy to carry that far.

I was pretty angry, but I knew he wasn’t the brightest spark, so I explained to him how I felt and let it go. He showed up a few days later with my birthday present: a VCR that he was planning to connect to my VCR to double-tape his favourite movie for me. The movie in question was a horror movie that was discussed in a conversation we had about how I couldn’t handle the sight of blood.

Then he asked me, “Do you have a blank tape?”