Online Dating Tries to Flirt With the Workplace
Last week, the dating app Feeld released a bot that, theoretically at least, lets you find out if your coworkers have crushes on you. The way it works is this: Once the bot is installed in the office chat platform Slack, you message the bot with the name of your crush. And then you wait. If they have also messaged the bot with a confession of love for you, the bot will let you know you like each other.
The first thing I thought when I read about this was: This is a technology that Laura Linney’s character from Love Actually—a nervous turtlenecked mouse who loves her hot coworker Karl silently and obsessively from afar—would use if the movie was set in the modern day. “@karl,” she would type into Slack, chewing her nails as she looked at Rodrigo Santoro’s bespectacled avatar and hoped beyond hope that the desperate act would deliver her from her unrequited longing.
Karl and Laura Linney’sSarah eventually do hook up without the help of the internet. But the workplace had a shockingly lax culture around office romances, far more lax than many nonfictional workplaces today.
