A first-year student at the University of Calgary in Canada simply wanted to get in contact with a woman he met at a bar, but what he got was much more than he bargained for.

Carlos Zetina bonded with a fellow student named Nicole and helped her and her friend get home Thursday night. And when it came time to exchange numbers, she gave him the wrong one. It could have been the old “give-him-the-wrong-number” blow-off, but Zetina wasn’t worried.

Determined to contact this mysterious woman whose last name he did not get, he went through the entire campus directory the next day and emailed everyone with the name Nicole or something like it, including Nicolettes and Nicks.

The ambitious and thorough student emailed 247 people, including professors, deans, and students.

The subject read, “Met you last night and you gave me the wrong number.” He began the “mass email” by letting Nicole off the hook if she just didn’t want to talk to him. But in case she did, he provided further identifying details, “you’re from Holland and you think Nietzsche is depressing,” and his phone number.

Unfortunately for Zetina, the “original” Nicole was not on this chain. But that didn’t stop “the other Nicoles” from talking.

“It took off right away, and Carlos was almost immediately removed from the chain and it was just the Nicoles,” the University of Calgary undergrad says. And this is how a new girl gang, or the “Network of Nicoles,” was formed. “It was 200 emails long by the end of the day,” DuGraye says.

Full story here.

We talked in last week’s HAPAYHN about last chance, hail mary texts. This is an example of the hail mary of all hail mary’s. A guy meeting a girl, getting the wrong number, and then mass emailing every person with her name on his college campus, all in the name of romance. The internet is a powerful tool, and things can escalate quickly. No doubt this young man probably had an “oh shit, what have I done” moment when he realized that he’d gone from Facebook stalking all of the girls named “Nicole” in a five mile radius of his house, to emailing 250 of them in a romantic effort that was bound to go viral. 

Let’s break this down in the three following sections.

The missed connection: There’s nothing worse than this: especially when you’re an idiot college kid. I say this as an idiot college kid who romanticized missed connections that then grew into an idiot adult who romanticizes missed connections. I’m an expert. You meet someone, even if just for a split second, and you get that lightning bolt moment of instantaneous connection- and then as quickly, as they arrive, they’re gone: and you realize you’ve got nothing.  As i mentioned before, the internet is a powerful tool, and very useful in a situation like this, but boy oh boy can it get out of control quickly. You know, there may have been a time where I’d have been very quick to shit on this kid’s actions, but then again, I also publicly admitted to filling out a craigslist missed connection last year- so I’m all in on romance, clearly. 

The email: This is a savage move. This is shameless. This is hitting on 246 girls for the sake of finding the 247th. I love it. I love it all: the guts, the romantic naivety, the unwarranted faith in the kindness and sanctity of the internet. The actual act of emailing an entire group of complete strangers who share names that sound like “Nicole” without using bcc is upstaged only by the 246 strangers then deleting you from the email chain and all becoming friends and meeting: without you. That’s unbelievable. That, my friends, is internet community at its finest. You’ve got this poor schmuck exposing his heart to the heavens hoping on a prayer that the Nicole he met gets this email, reads this email, remembers him, and doesn’t immediately throw a permanent block on his address, and instead his whole chain gets hijacked by the vast majority of people not involved. It’s fucking brutal: it’s perfect.

The outcome: All of that glory aside, this guy ends up meeting her! She’s not included in the original email because she doesn’t have a university address, but she finds out about because this thing blows up. WHAT. Then she’s actually interested in meeting up with this guy again, because it turns out she did accidentally give him the wrong number because she’s new to the country. WHAT. Everybody wins! Romance lives! Every best case scenario from this story played out! Everybody buy a lotto ticket! This story has it all: a guy throwing it all out there to find the girl who got away, a group of young women beset by a mass email turning what could have been a hindrance into an excuse to come together as a new group of friends, and a rectified missed connection! I believe again!

Of course, this type of thing will never happen again, and in the long run it probably causes more harm than good.

Thanks to Carlos, every dude who’s going to be given a fake number for the foreseeable future is going to keep his poor hopes alive far longer than they deserve, and will refuse to take no for an answer. Love is dead, losers.