Nowadays, if you ask a person my age how they found out about their job, they will often answer with a rushed, “I actually found out it on Craigslist,” accompanied by a little grimace indicating they are a bit ashamed, as if finding your job on Craigslist undermines its legitimacy and prestige. I understand why that might be felt. After all, this is the same website where if you navigate away from the job page, in one to two short clicks you can find yourself at the “casual encounters” page, with postings like “Wife had affair. I figure it’s my turn. Please respond with ‘Affair’ in the subject line and a picture.” However, can anyone really fault the fresh out of college job hunters and even the employers themselves for not wanting to pay the ridiculous enrollment fees dictated by sites strictly focused on employment? Seemingly, Craigslist is an economical and valid site to turn to for the twenty-something who has not yet made many connections in their respective career field.
My roommate Christina and I had our own run in with Craigslist this May, however our encounter with the site had to do with real estate. We were trying to find an apartment in New York City to live in while we completed summer internships. Still undergraduate students, we were both forced to conduct the search remotely, fretting away in our carrels at our schools in Texas and Tennessee while we should have been studying for exams. Although apprehensive about turning to Craigslist at first, at the thought of enrollment fees and broker fees, it seemed a good option.
Although both raised in the South, the stereotypical notion that many seem to have regarding naïveté and the Southern girl does not apply here. Christina was raised by a tough Italian mother from Brooklyn and spent a brief time living in New Jersey in high school. Although short in stature, she’s feisty; the type of girl who will stand in front of a cab if someone steals it from her, feet firmly planted and refusing to budge until the other party concedes. I would call myself a bit more mild mannered, but extremely cynical. When we decided to turn to Craigslist, we both examined the photos and information with a fine-toothed comb. “Clearly stock photos,” we’d scoff, or, “Wire transfer via Western Union? You’d have to be an idiot!”
A few days into our search, Christina found a two-bedroom apartment in the Lower East Side on Delancey Street. The ad had a relatively lengthy description and photos that seemed legitimate. “Across from a preschool in a safe neighborhood!” the description boasted. Compared to the atrocious grammar that many of the other Craigslist ads contained, the listing was detailed and intelligible. Although the rent was a bit low, we consciously ignored it. After all, the time for our internships to begin was looming closer and the thought of not having a place to live was making us both lose sleep at night, sleep that our brains, exhausted enough from cramming for exams, could frankly not afford to lose. After lengthy email exchanges, texts and phone calls with the apartment’s apparent owner, Berry Cyrus, Christina bit the bullet and deposited $2,300 deposit into Cyrus’s bank account to secure the apartment. We turned back to focusing on our finals, fears over where we would be living finally put to rest.
A few days later, with finals over, Christina attempted to get in touch with Cyrus to arrange the drop off of keys and iron out other details. Cyrus did not return her phone calls, emails or text messages. Somewhat panicked, Christina called me, fearing that despite our very best efforts, we had been scammed. A couple days later, Cyrus finally emailed Christina. His grammar and clarity had noticeably weakened. Claiming his email had been hacked and his friend had been in a “gassy accident” abroad, he begged Christina to forgive him and continue payments, because his “friend's life depended on it!” The gall of this man! we thought. Did he really think he could fool us a second time?
Feeling taken advantage of, gullible, and still without a place to live, we tried to make the best of the Cyrus situation and chalk it up to a learning experience. We laughed wryly over the word choice of a “gassy accident.” Christina derided herself, wondering how she could be stupid enough to think someone would be named “Berry,” like the fruit, as opposed to “Barry”; I attempted to comfort her, remembering an old soccer coach who used the fruit spelling. Every trial we encountered became a “Berry Cyrus”; if the self-checkout at CVS was refusing to work, it was because Berry Cyrus had managed to crawl in the machine and continue his personal vendetta against us. Although funny, these jokes could only temporarily push aside the sobering reality of such a large sum being lost to an anonymous Internet scammer.
Over a 12 pack of beer, we indignantly launched our angry tirade against Craigslist itself. If this had happened to us, we thought, was it not happening to hundreds of people around the country? Or were we the only people gullible enough to fall for the likes of Berry Cyrus? If Craigslist wanted to be a legitimate marketplace, didn’t it need a more structured way of vetting the people who post?
Upon further reflection, however, I must concede that Craigslist does not pretend to be something that it is not. Over the years it has been in operation, it has not strayed from the simple message board format, with white background and blue font. It has not plagued browsers with ads on the side of the page to try to gain revenue (if it had, it might be easier to demand a more hi-tech, seller-inspecting website).
Transparency will never be synonymous with the Internet, and no one realizes this better than Craigslist. By virtue of how accessible it is to the masses, Craigslist will always attract the Berry Cyrus’s and the foot fetishists of the world, which will undermine its credibility to some extent. Clearly the owners of Craigslist prize the open forum format and the approachable nature of their site over any goals of it becoming a site solely for seeking employment or apartments for thoroughly scrutinized individuals with the “right” credentials.
However, to avoid the inevitable grimace that comes with the admittance that a job was found on Craigslist, and the harrowing tales of real estate fraudsters like Berry Cyrus, do we really need to submit to the for-profit employment and real estate web sites and shell out enrollment fees, which could still very likely end with fruitless searches? It seems that some sort of balance must be struck between the hodge-podge, scarily anonymous sites like Craigslist, and those that eventually demand enrollment fees after a very bare bones, payment-free access to their websites. Hopefully demand will see the rise of such a site in the future.
To close: as many a seasoned New Yorker will tell you, the only way to find an apartment in the city without using a broker is through an actual living, breathing, non-cyber friend. Although quite late to the party in this realization, with much money spent and anxiety created, Christina and I we were fortunate enough to couch surf for a few days and find a place through a mutual friend. These days we could not be happier, although we still run into mishaps created by our elusive Craigslist landlord (did my sealed cup of salad dressing really just explode in my pocketbook? #&$&# Berry Cyrus!!!)
