Say, why are all these balloon bouquets being delivered to the office?

Here’s the first thought that goes through your mind when you’re a single guy and Valentine’s Day sneaks up on you and you’ve inadvertantly made casual dinner plans for that night.

Shit.

For those of us in single world, who are not in a relationship, perhaps seeing a few people here and there casually, nothing serious, it can, shall we say, be a bad night to have made dinner plans with one of those aforementioned people.

Let’s just say there was more scrambling and damage control in the aftermath than the White House has shown in the Cheney-shooting-a-man debacle.

For me, it was planned as just a basic dinner. My first inkling of trouble came when I called Union Square Café yesterday afternoon to make dinner reservations and was told they had been booked solid for last night for about, oh, a month. Huh?

Shit.

Then I started realizing why my friend “Sally” (as in When Harry Met… she gets in more dating jams than me, last night being just the latest) had seemed a tad surprised to get the invite last week.

So then, of course, the paranoia starts running through my feverish mind. Do I cancel with Sally, do I make it very clear that, “Ok, it’s the big romantic day of the year, women all over the city are floating around with flowers and balloon bouquets, but, hey, it’s just Tuesday dinner, we’ve gotta eat don’t we?”

Fortunately for moi, despite the fact that she has breasts and smells really good, she has a crude male mindset too, and was not really thinking, “Ahh, this is the big night, and I’m the one he’s chosen!” (And quite the coup that would have been for her, let me tell you).

As she told me over her 3rd Vodka tonic – “If you had waited until the Thursday before Valentine’s Day to actually be inviting me to a Valentine’s Day dinner, I would have literally ripped your throat out.”

Don’t you love when they get all girly?

And advertisers of America, can you maybe start the drumbeat for flowers and jewelry and restaurants a couple of weeks earlier next year? Give a clueless guy some more advance warning.