Table For One

Table For One

For most single people, the sad reminder of Valentine’s Day has one consolation—it’s only for a day. But Benjamin A. Maas ’05 may be haunted by St. Valentine’s legacy for some time yet. On this year’s fateful Valentine’s Day, Maas received a devastating piece of news: the Currier House Datamatch had proclaimed him the Least Compatible Match for nearly every girl in the house.

Currier’s own version of Datamatch, Lustfest Matchmaker 2003, had begun to solicit survey responses a week earlier, under the sponsorship of the Currier House Committee (HoCo). On the night of Valentine’s Day, when the results were distributed, there was no stopping Maas’s secret from both spreading and worsening by the minute, like mold on bad cheese. “People began comparing their results around dinner time and most girls realized their least compatible was Ben Maas,” Currier HoCo President Lacey R. Whitmire ’05 explains in an e-mail. Whitmire was not sure if Maas was the “statistically declared loser” or was just generally known to be the universal bad match.

Maas, a tall, brown-haired Canadian, is not at a complete loss for his dismal showing. He has long suspected that his “smelly roommates” had their hands in the matter, along with Whitmire herself. As of now, however, Maas can only hide behind the fact that he did not actually fill out a Lustfest form himself—his roommates took care of the form for him. But, then again, who could know you better than the people you live with?

“They made me, like, 4’9” and they checked both guys and girls,” says Maas. “They made me a bisexual midget.”

For someone whose friends were willing to go out on a limb for him and get him a date, Maas is awfully ungrateful. “The head of the HoCo was definitely in on this whole scam. She definitely gave them the go-ahead,” says Maas. As for his roommates: “They definitely smell.”

When Maas is given the chance to make his case to an ever-impartial FM reporter, he feigns confidence. “Well, I’m pretty sure that I would have answered every question the exact opposite of what they put, so then I would be everyone’s best match.”

But the efforts of Maas’s friends are not entirely fruitless, even if Maas stubbornly refuses to see the up side of LustFest. At least he now knows whom he’s most compatible with—a fellow Currier resident who calls himself “Thomas the Tank Engine.”