You Suck at Craigslist

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  • YSaC, Vol. 328: Not just Craigslist, Vol. 3

    We’ve had a few posts from kijiji.com in the past, and today I’d like to share a couple of posts from other online classifieds sites.

    From backpage.com comes this help wanted ad:

    … Aggravated Office Manager

    posted: May 22, 2009, 03:02 PM

    We need an office manager for local retail store. Good verbal skills are necessary, great starting wage, potential for advancement, no certification required.Great opportunity for someone who is outgoing with a pleasant personality. We will provide all required training for our staff.

    Salaries start at $750 to $1,000 per week.

    I can’t even think of what word they meant to put in the title. Motivated? Sure. Ambitious? Makes sense.  Aggravated? (But with a pleasant personality, of course.) Are they going to train me to be aggravated? Or do they expect that skill set already and will train me to be outgoing and pleasant? If it’s the latter, my mother has been trying to do that for years and it’s not gone well.

    And then, from OLX.com:

    Suddenly, shots rang out…

    in the food court of one of the area’s busiest shopping malls. It was Saturday afternoon. Hundreds of people, consisting mostly of kids and women, were chaotically scrambling for cover. When the smoke had cleared, it looked like the scene from a movie set. Lots of bloodied bodies, muffled moans of pain, and cries for help. Can you imagine yourself, or your loved ones, caught up in such a nightmare? I can’t, which is where the concept of [Crappy online mall aggregator, or COMA for short] originated. [COMA].com is a web-based mall, consisting of a virtual hodge-podge of stores, which, unlike conventional malls, specializes in wholesale items, great deals, bargains galore, discounts, low prices, and great selections. You’d be hard-pressed to find a bricks and mortar establishment with more varieties of stores ( and more are being added daily ). I put [COMA] together with the hopes of keeping my loved ones out of the malls ( and my nightmare ) as much as possible. It has been pretty effective so far. The kids have been the hardest sell, probably so because their main reason for going to the mall is to socialize. I’ve gotten rave reviews from them about the site, however, so it has been somewhat effective on them. So take a tip from the kids. Take a trip to www.[COMA].com. You’ll be glad you did. You’ll not only save money on items that you purchase, but you will save gas, because all of the stores deliver to your door. So come see why, at [COMA], our name says it all.

    Well, maybe the name I gave you says it all — your store is a crappy online mall aggregator. It’s poorly designed, and whoever is writing your copy has no idea about the proper use of apostrophes or conjunctions. (Seriously: “You’re childs toy’s”? Really? Apparently the online bookstore in this COMA doesn’t have any dictionaries or writing books.)

    Worst of all, you’re preying on people’s fears to drive business to your site. “Shop with us, and you won’t get gunned down in Abercrombie & Fitch like a commerce-driven dog!”

    Maybe not, but I also won’t get that guy standing in the food court offering me samples of bourbon chicken, now, will I? Until you figure out how to offer free samples of bourbon chicken through the internet, I’ll take my chances in the mall.*

    *Though I’m not going into Hot Topic. You can’t make me.

    [Thanks to Sarah for the “Aggravated Office Manager” listing, and thanks to the folks at OLX for calling my attention to their site by offering me money [which I didn’t take] to promote them here. (I’m too damned ethical — I also didn’t take a free piece of jewelry from some site that wanted me to link to them.)]

  • YSaC, Vol. 327: It’s about time!

    Antic- Couch – $3500

    This beautiful Antic French prevention style couch has been in the family for over 40 years. The reason for the sale is that we are moving out of country. Will accept only cash or cashers check, will deliver also.

    I was getting worried that our favorite furniture style wasn’t showing up on Craigslist anymore. I thought people might actually be learning something from this blog, and we can’t have that!

    Thank goodness for this beautiful item — it’s an antic, you know!

    Thanks for spotting this, Erin!

  • YSaC, Vol. 326: You should see her follicles.

    WANTED LIVE PORE TAPE – m4w – 40

    I AM LOOKING FOR LIVE PORE TAPES REAL WOMAN

    Katey sends this in, saying, “I knew my large pores would be appreciated someday!”

    Dude. You are On. The. Internet. You managed to press the right buttons (well, most of them) to post an ad on Craigslist. HOW CAN YOU NOT FIND YOUR OWN PORN? I mean, maybe spelling “porn” right would help, but still … I manage to find porn even when I’m NOT looking for it, and an hour or so later I have to close the window.

    Plus, this was in men seeking women. If he’s looking for a real woman in there, he’s screwed — they’re all bots and ads.

  • Update: Host switch completed, with minimal exploding.

    Update to the update, Monday, 10 pm: It seems to be working, and working well! There may be a few lost comments if you commented on anything this afternoon; there was a brief period of time between finally figuring out how to export the old site and figuring out how to import it to the new location, and if anyone commented during that rather frantic period, it didn’t make it over. I apologize!

    Thanks for your patience during the move! I look forward to not having to wait three minutes to switch between the edit mode and the preview mode while I’m writing posts.

    Update, Mon 4:15 pm: I think we’ve made the switch … DNS will probably take a while to propagate around the intertubes so things might still be slow for a bit. Please let me know if anything weird happens on your end — let me know either in the comments, or via email to yousuckatcraigslist@gmail.com. (Also let me know if it’s working better!) Today’s post is up below this entry if’n you haven’t seen it yet.

    Hi folks. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably just sat there for about ten seconds waiting for the page to load (or more! It takes me ~30 seconds sometimes!).

    That’s unacceptable, so I’m switching hosts this week. (For what it’s worth, FatCow is my old hosting provider, and as of right now I’m planning to move to WebFaction.com. I’m really not happy with the service from FatCow — from searching around online I’ve found that I’m not the only one experiencing these problems with them recently.)

    What that means is that at some point or another, something is bound to go wonky with the site — it will be unavailable or the formatting will explode or something else weird will happen. Murphy’s Law, right?

    If we do go down, please be patient — YSaC will be back, and hopefully be faster than before. I’ll try to update the Facebook page and the Twitter feed when things are back to normal.

    In the meantime, use your spare time (you know, the time you’ve been using to wait for the pages to load!) to search for Craigslist posts to send in! Oh, and have a sammich.

  • YSaC, Vol. 325: Don’t touch me, I’m busy crying.

    This was listed under Creative Services:

    will do what it takes

    will cry at beds pretend to be family u pick just no guys touching can bring others at your request u can pick them hit me up very open minded

    I think someone’s seen “While You Were Sleeping” a few too many times. Either that, or we’ve found the solution to the “I need someone to pretend to be my girlfriend” posts.

  • YSaC, Vol. 324: Someone to watch over me ….

    Need Pet sitter maybe 2 nites a week

    I’m a sales guy that travels about 2 nites a week for work. I am looking for someone or preferably a couple that loves dogs and would like my dog Forest’s company. He is ZERO trouble, sits on your lap like your best friend and only wants his tummy scratched as much as he can get it done lol

    If your going to reply with how much does it pay, don’t reply, i need someone to watch him that isn’t looking to make money off him

    a retired couple would be best as he loves being outside walking if possible or a fenced yard. Also he’d prefer no children.

    thanks,
    jeff
    xxx-xxx-xxxx
    323

    Translation: I need a pet sitter, but I’m not willing to pay for the service.

    What’s awful about this is that I can think of a lot of ways he could have spun this request that would have made it slightly less asshattish. For example, he could have said, “I know that elderly couples enjoy having animals around, so I would be willing to leave my dog with you a couple of nights a week while I am at work.” It still has the same meaning — i.e., I’m not willing to pay for a sitter — but it’s not as bad as “Don’t reply if you want pay because I’m not paying you.”

    [Thanks for the submission, Jen!]