Sifting Through the Crap
Searching for something of value
Back in 2003, I’d been looking for steady day work for several months. As a comedian, I needed a job that had enough hours that I could pay my bills, yet flexible enough that I could leave for a few days if something better came up. This meant spending a lot of time on the Craig’s List “part time/etcetera section”, competing with thousands of other people for the three jobs that sounded like they weren’t a complete scam.
If you weren’t old enough in the early millennium to have been broke and conducting business on the Internet, Craig’s List had replaced newspaper classified ads with a single website where you could arrange a date, a job interview, or to pick up a free sofa, all with the same probability that the ad was placed by someone who was going to murder you.
Out of frustration, I placed my own fake Craig’s List ad, claiming that I ran a company providing the service of sifting through organic waste for contraband that people had swallowed, or valuables that pets had eaten, thinking I had invented the one completely demeaning job that no self-respecting person would want. Forgetting who was looking for work on Craig’s List.
Within the first two hours, I received three hundred responses. Over the next month, I got hundreds upon hundreds more, over a thousand, all with resumes, many misspelled, many who ended up following-up because they hadn’t heard from me and they were very interested in getting started in the exciting field of sifting through shit for hours in search of something of value. Little realizing that, by searching Craig’s List for a worthwhile job, they already had.
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