How many people can say that they’ve done a manual full table scan for their valentine? I can.
When I first met my wife, she introduced herself as “[FirstName] + [LastName]”, however my brain encountered an “OH, WOW!” error and stopped processing after her [FirstName]. I didn’t want to ask her or anybody else what her [LastName] was, lest she think I wasn’t paying enough attention to remember (when, really, the exact opposite was true). In today’s high-tech world, this would not have been a problem, but we met long before the internet and search engines.
Over the next few months, I saw my wife many times at church and at school (I was a graduate student; she was on staff). But never was her [LastName] again presented to me. One day, she stopped by my townhouse when I wasn’t home. She left a note that only said “Call me.”, followed by her [PhoneNumber] and her [FirstName]. I wanted to keep my secret safe, so I had only one option – the phone book. I spent the next several hours conducting a manual scan of the Galveston white pages. I started on the first page and just kept reading until I found her phone number. It appeared in the W’s. At last armed with the knowledge of my valentine’s [LastName], I made the call.
We’ve been married over 25 years now.