I recently became single. Yeah, sad, I know. But it happens.
So even though I’m looking forward to being Mr. Man On The Town during the 2009 CAN!!CAN/PunkTorah Tour, I thought it might be fun to check out JDate* and see what it is all about. Plus, Tu B’Av (Jewish Valentine’s Day) is coming up, and it would be nice to not feel like a loser.
I don’t know about you, but after ten minutes of being on the Golden-Calf-of-Cyber-Yentas, I can safely say that JDate is the epitome of boring ass, gaywad Jewish crap.
JDate exists in the same realm that suburban JCCs, "young professionals groups" and Temple Singles Clubs inhabit: "we’re trying to be hip and edgy, but it takes gallons of fruit-flavored flourescent martinis, the latest Crackberry and shopping trips to Banana Republic to get us there."
To top it off, JDate costs a shit ton of money. Sure, it’s free to get a profile. But that’s like someone giving you a brand new Iphone…only without a screen. No self respecting bohemian Jew would do JDate because $40.00 to look at pictures of people you went to summer camp with is just not worth it. You can buy weed for that!
I decided that JDate needed to be hacked. I needed to see if it was possible to get around paying a billion dollars a month to talk to twenty-nine year old corporate paper pushers who enjoy jalapeno poppers at Chili’s and going to the outlet mall on Sundays.
Here’s what I tried:
Test #1: Simply put your email address in the profile (duh!)
Conclusion: Fail! The second you put a Yahoo, Gmail or whatever, the darn robots get ya! Try as you might with Y.A.H.OOs or gee-mail, but they’ll find you out.
Test #2: Browse the photos of your Hebrew Hotties. Once you find a potential love/lust interest, you just remember what they look like and find them on the Facebook Jewster ap.
Conclusion: Moderate fail! The theory works. You can look at someone’s age/location/Jewish background and use that criteria to search for them on Jewster. Problem is, Jewster just isn’t that popular. I did have luck finding one girl who lives near me, but there’s thousands of Jews in my area so one-out-of-a-billion is not a success ratio worth getting excited over.
Test #3: Make your profile name on the site the same as your Twitter name. Then, write your ad in all lowercase letters, except the letters that spell out the secret message "FIND ME ON TWITTER @".
Conclusion: After a few days, it looked like the JDate robots hadn’t discovered my little technique. So I tried rewriting my profile and making it more obvious. Another day later, and it’s still up!
I deserve some kind of award for figuring that out. If they catch me (which they will if they see this article), then I’ll just find a new way.
*Full Disclosure: I’m not a virgin to the JDate thing. I actually asked the parent company of JDate to sponsor my band’s tour. They respectfully declined and said, "maybe in the future". I think the Moshiach will come before then.