Club Endless Fantasy
“I can probably explain it best.” Paul looked towards Joe, who motioned for him to take the lead. “I was the one that first noticed it.”
“Okay.” I turned my attention to Paul.
“The update we rolled out yesterday was supposed to match people up quicker.” He leaned forward. “More specifically, it was supposed to make everything more concise so that we could get people on the app and talking before it’s too late to be someone’s Secret Santa.”
“Right.” I nodded. “We can’t afford for our clients to get matched with people they don’t like—it’s not a buffet like Tinder.”
“That’s where the problem comes in.” Paul sighed. “Some people simply aren’t getting any matches with the new update.”
“Well…” I looked around the table. “That’s not a little kink—that’s a major problem.”
“We’ve been testing some stuff,” Joe interjected himself in the conversation when he realized I was getting antsy. “My team isn’t leaving until it’s fixed.”
“How will you know it’s working right?” I tilted my head inquisitively.
“We’ve got some default profiles set up to test things.” He leaned forward. “It’s going to be fine; I promise.”
I trusted Joe and his entire team, but we couldn’t afford any complications. A dating app that was designed to end shortly after Christmas Day needed to match people up fast. We certainly couldn’t have people out there that didn’t get matched up with anyone. That was the kind of thing that would make our customers think the app didn’t work. With other dating apps they at least had the courtesy of being rejected by the person they were matched with—not getting matched with anyone at all was not going to build customer loyalty. Then there was the worst-case scenario where they thought they were incompatible with the rest of the human race.
That’s a holiday downer for sure…
I decided that I wasn’t going to leave un
til I had confirmation that the app was working. If my team was staying late to make that happen, then I was going to be there with them. I ordered pizza for everyone once I realized that they were going to be staying well past dinnertime. A breakthrough finally came, and a few tests confirmed that it was working. The matches were nearly instantaneous if there were enough compatibilities in the profiles. We loaded it on our server, rolled it out, and I prepared to say goodnight when one of the tester phones lit up with a message from the app.
“Uh—Joe?” I tilted my head inquisitively and picked up the phone. “Is this supposed to happen?”
“What happened?” He walked over.
“It says there’s a match.” I held it up so he could see.
“No.” He shook his head quickly and took the phone from my hand. “Those profiles aren’t supposed to be live—they’re just for testing.”
“We might need to pull the update…” I felt my stomach twist into a knot. “There could be other issues…”
“I’m checking.” Paul started rapidly typing on his computer.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Alexander. I take full responsibility.” Joe opened the app. “I thought I made sure everything was working right.”
“It’s okay, just fix it.” I sighed and sat down.
“Oh damn…” Joe blinked a couple of times.
“What is it?” I raised my eyebrows in concern.
“When we set up the tester profiles, we used real profiles from everyone in the office so that they were authentic…” He hesitated for a moment, and I saw concern in his eyes.
“So?” I shrugged. “We do that with all the apps…”
“Well, this one.” He sighed. “Mr. Alexander, this is your profile.”
“Oh!” My eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Well, don’t worry about that—just roll the update out and send them an error message or something. I’m sure she’ll understand.”
“Aren’t you at least curious to see who you got matched up with?” Joe chuckled under his breath.
“No.” I shook my head back and forth.
“Hey…” Paul walked over to where we were sitting. “I checked everything, and it looks like your tester profile was the only one that got uploaded—we don’t have any other errors…”