Ok, now I guess I’ve gotta reveal who my employer was. At that time they were the largest ‘Singles’ Magazine in the world. Oh don’t worry: definitely ‘table top’ content with certainly nothing to be embarrassed about. Ok, on to the chase. Their main profit center was ‘personal advertising’. Sorry “Christopher Reeves” (ie a typical interview for the magazine). Of course, it’s my nature to always be innovative so I spawned other areas to enhance the experience (anonymous phone calls, photos, anonymous email addresses, etc). The company saw more dollar signs in another way. So they decided to use their subscription list to solicit a ‘personal’ matching service. With the volume of our list I knew we couldn’t employ enough people to fulfill that effort … unless I found a way to ‘assist’ the crew. So, I set off to create a matching program. Combined with a psychologically sophisticated and stealth questionnaire we had what TODAY is still a state of the art matching algorithm. Sorry ‘MATCH’, but it’s true. There was only one problem: the program was so successful, we couldn’t build our subscriber list fast enough. Another problem was it was highly CPU intensive. So, I spent allot of nights sleeping at the office just to fill the paper in our HP Laser printer throughout the night. Too bad we hadn’t yet entered the internet. Cause if just 10 years later, there wouldn’t be a match.com. Interestingly, I still own the rights to the code. Maybe I should spin it up again. Of course, using today’s tools. What do you think? If only I had another me.