I downloaded Grindr for one night

I set a timer. Forty-five minutes on the clock app, the same one I use for the laundry downstairs, because otherwise I leave my stuff in the washer and somebody piles it on the folding table.

I want that part on the record before anything else.

It was a Tuesday in February. There was salt dried white all over the car and it was getting dark by five thirty. I'd come off a call week on Sunday and slept most of Monday, and there was half a Donatos in the fridge with a dinner plate on top of it because I don't buy foil.

I do IT support at a hospital. Six years, since right out of school. Most of the job is walking up to a floor and plugging a cable back in, or hauling a workstation on wheels out of a doorframe somebody's been ramming it into since before I got there. But part of my access is a console where I can pull up a device and see everything installed on it. Not personal phones. I know it's not personal phones. I helped write the enrollment profile and I could tell you which checkbox it is.

I laid there thinking about the checkbox for a while anyway.

So I made rules. Forty-five minutes and then it comes off the phone. I wasn't going to meet anybody, though I'd already decided I wasn't going to talk to anybody either, so the meeting part was pretty far down the list.

It installed in about fifteen seconds. I put it in the folder on my third page with Compass and the rest of the stuff Apple won't let you delete. My mom's phone is on the same account. I set hers up for her two Christmases ago.

Then the grid comes up and there's a number under every square. Two hundred feet. Four hundred. One of them was closer than the mailboxes are.

The other rule was no picture of me. That one turned out not to be much of a rule. Most of the squares are the gray head with no face on it.

I put the phone face down on my chest and laid there. That was eight minutes of the timer, right there, doing nothing.

Somebody messaged me at 11:34. No face on his either, just a photo of a front desk at night, which I thought was a strange thing to lead with until he told me where he was.

He said his name was Ray. I've got no idea if that's true.

He was at work. Night audit at one of the hotels off Stelzer by the airport, the kind where it's flight crews and guys in town to look at a warehouse. Eleven to seven by himself, and the audit itself doesn't run until three. So he had four hours and a lobby with nothing in it.

We started on the Blue Jackets because I had the recap on and said so. He'd been to two games in his life and they lost both, and he told me where he parked both times.

Then the printer. The one behind the desk that does boarding passes had been jamming all night and he'd been fighting it since ten. He described the noise it made. I told him to open the back panel and look for a little green lever, and he sent me a picture of the inside of it. He wrote back, there's two green ones in here, which one's the lever. It's a Brother. My aunt's got the same one.

The Equinox his mom drives needs a catalytic converter and the shop on Sinclair wants nineteen hundred for it. Then Cedar Point, because a guy he works with is doing his bachelor party there in June, which he thinks is insane. He eats the same thing every shift. Two gas station taquitos and a blue Powerade.

The timer went off at 12:05. I killed it with my thumb while I was reading his next message, and then about twenty minutes later I remembered I'd done it.

He asked what I did for work and I told him, and then he asked if the tickets come in already ranked or if I'm the one who decides what's bad. Which is a real question. I told him about the queue, and about how a doctor will call it a priority one because a mouse battery died. He asked another one after that.

Nobody asks a second question about my job. My mother doesn't.

Around two he asked if I wanted to come sit in the lobby. Said nobody comes in after two and the coffee's free and terrible. I had maps open before I'd decided anything. Twenty-two minutes at that hour, out 270, and I know the exit because there's a Raising Cane's you can see from the ramp.

I didn't answer for a bit. Then I said I couldn't tonight. There wasn't a reason. I was in a chair in my own apartment with nobody in the building who'd have noticed.

He said ok. Then he said the printer had started up on its own and put out four blank pages, and asked if that was normal.

Somewhere after that I told him I'd downloaded the app that night and had never had it before. I don't know why I said it. He said ok to that too, and then asked if I'd eaten anything.

At three he went quiet for about forty minutes to do the actual audit. When he came back the drawer was eleven dollars over and he couldn't find where it came from, so he wrote it on a sticky note and moved on. He asked if a drawer being over counts against you the same as being short. I don't know anything about that.

At four he sent his number and said text me whenever, or don't, either one. I saved it as Dell - Ray, parts, because I've already got four vendor numbers in there and it doesn't look like anything sitting in the list.

Then I deleted the app, right then, before I put the phone down. I'd like credit for one thing off the list.

I badged in at seven and got a coffee off the cart in the south lobby. First ticket of the day was a monitor on 4 South that wouldn't wake up. It was the cable. It's always the cable. The charge nurse thanked me about four times more than the job was worth and I stood there holding the display cable saying it was no problem.

That was three weeks ago Tuesday. I haven't texted him.

There's a machine by the elevators on 2 that takes exact change and won't give you a lid. I keep quarters in the car door for it.