Ian Posts About Pool in Verve Facebook Group

The Verve condo building has a community Facebook group for the residents, like most condo buildings do.

Residents post about various things and discuss in the group. I had set push notifications for the group on my phone so I would be alerted to the latest news from the building from my neighbours. One day, I notice a notification for a post about the pool. I had meant to use the pool more that summer, so I opened up the post to read more. It was a post written by Ian.

There were issues with residents bringing too many guests. He suggested the building hire a lifeguard instead of paying an expensive security guard to manage access to the pool. Get more bang for our buck.

But his post wasn’t important.

What was important is that I noticed Ian’s profile photo. Wasn’t that the guy who also works at Sportsnet?

I reached out, slipping in Ian’s DMs. (A direct message using Facebook’s built-in chat).

“Hey! Didn’t know you also lived at Verve! I’ve never seen you around.”

After many missed meetings and connections that I didn’t even know about at the time, we were finally talking.

The text conversation went into the wee hours of the morning. Chatting mostly about work. An easy shared topic and icebreaker. But also about living in the Village, and upcoming Pride plans.

Ian was actually at his parents place that night.  So the next morning when he woke up so late, he had to come up with some excuse why he didn’t get to sleep earlier.  “Uh… I just couldn’t sleep?”

Our conversation had finally started… and it wouldn’t stop… ever.

Daily text conversations happened every day… until this very day.