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Excerpt from letter sent in 1993
...So last night I've just come home and was going to shoot a little pool before fixing myself some dinner when Ron comes in with Paul's friend Tonya. Ron said that Paul had asked him (Ron) to take Tonya out for a Valentine's dinner. I was confused, but I tagged along. Over the course of this dinner, I finally got to find out what was going along. Apparently, some guy had sent Tonya a bunch of roses for Valentine's. Later that day the guy asked her out to dinner.
She liked him, but didn't want to deal with the pressure of having dinner with him on Valentine's day after he had just given her roses--she wasn't that serious. So she had told this guy she already had plans. Then she apparently headed over to Geoworks Berkeley and asked Paul if he wanted to go out to dinner, seeing as how she didn't want to be spotted alone in some restaurant around campus. Paul was busy hacking, and said he wasn't going to dinner any time soon. Couldn't she find some other Geoworker to go out to dinner with?
She figured she could, but didn't want to go from cubicle to cubicle asking guys out to dinner on Valentine's day. She told Paul that she couldn't go with some other Geoworker unless they asked her. So Paul had sent e-mail to Ron telling Ron to ask Tonya out to dinner. So the whole reason that the three of us were going out to dinner was that Tonya was trying to avoid a romantic situation. Which somehow doesn't seem like the intention of Valentine's day, but there you go.
So as we're approaching the restaurant, I look through the window and say "That waitress--isn't that Diana?" Diana was the on-again off-again girlfriend of Chris B., fellow Geoworker and carpooler. Presently off-again. Probably permanently. As of very recently. I was looking through the window, trying to tell if it was her. Ron walked right in, with Tonya following. I figured he must have got a better look at this waitress and figured out that it wasn't Diana. So it wouldn't be awkward to go in. So I went in.
It was Diana. Ron hadn't known about the recent breakup and walked up to her. Just trying to be friendly, he said "Hi, we'd like a table for Chris B." She just looked at Ron and didn't say a word. By this time, I was sitting down at a table, had looked up and figured out that this woman was in fact Diana and not just a look-alike. So we ended up eating in that restaurant. Fortunately, another waitress ended up serving us. Jeez, what an awkward situation.