While getting into bed at 2:03 am on Friday night, 24-year-old Morgan Clarke received a friendly yet highly perplexing Facebook chat from Jake Caropreso, her straight male acquaintance.
“Yo!” read the message.
Clarke claims she and Caropreso have only met a handful of times at various parties thrown by a mutual friend . Taking into account how little they know each other and the time of the night, Clarke naturally assumed it was a dreaded booty call attempt.
Transcripts from Friday night’s conversation show that Clarke let basic conversational pleasantries play out for several minutes, despite the unsettling premonition that a distasteful pickup line was imminent.
“My retainer was already in and I was really tired, so I needed to nip this in the bud before going to sleep,” Clarke said. “At that point, it was 2:26 am, so I just asked him point blank, ‘Is there something you need?’”
Caropreso reportedly replied with “nothing in particular…just saying hi!”
Clarke says this put her over the edge. “‘Just saying hi?’ I don’t even know what that means coming from a straight, single man. Why would he care what I did all day if he wasn’t trying to fuck me? It made NO sense.”
After a six-minute lull, Caropreso continued the conversation at 2:32 am by asking her what she did that day, which he followed up with an even more confounding move at 2:37 am when he asked Clarke how her job at HBO was going.
Desperate to put an end to the increasingly baffling situation, Clark asked Caropreso if he was looking for a job at HBO.
“haha no. i just remember your job sounded cool. i work as a firefighter,” Caropreso immediately replied.
“A dude mentioning that he’s a fireman is nature’s pickup line,” said Clarke. “At which point I was waiting for him to ask to meet up. But then he went on to talk about how he’s volunteering to rescue abandoned puppies on the weekends. What does he want from me? I was honestly starting to get scared.”
Clarke, who says she began putting curlers in her hair at this point since she was up anyway, claims that towards the end of the conversation, three bouncing dots appeared next to his name, indicating that he was typing, for two minutes straight.
“Honestly, him talking to me and not hitting on me was just as annoying as if he were hitting on me,” Clarke explained.
At 2:48 am, Caropreso finally sent a message. “well morgan, i’m turning in for the night. maybe i’ll see you at one of nick’s parties again soon!”
Running the events of the past 45 minutes through her head, Clarke wracked her brain for possible motives, but was ultimately forced to conclude that Caropreso was simply a genuine, congenial guy looking for a chat before bed.
“I still have no idea what the hell he was trying to get at,” Clarke said. “Fuck that guy.”
