I love Craigslist. I don’t love it in THAT way! I love it in a strictly platonic way … but nevertheless, it is a pretty awesome website as far as websites go. I actually was quite curious about Craigslist from a business stand-point after I saw the guy who started the website appear on a television talk show.

pparently, Craig Newmark lit up the company sometime in 1993 and hasn’t looked back! Since most of the ads and the posts are free, and hosted free of charge, I wondered HOW this company earned a whopping sum of  80 million US dollars as of  1st quarter 2008, and is worth up in the 5 billion US dollars area. Curious? Craigslist offers almost all of its services for free, with the exception of  charging for help wanted ads in three cities.  They also charge for apartment rental listings in NYC from apartment brokers.

Apparently, brokers asked us to charge them, to reduce redundancy and to improve quality … and it has worked incredibly well in everyone’s favor. I especially love the “Best of Craigslist” section, where they showcase the best and often times the worst of what people all over the world (but mostly and strangely in the United States) have to say, sell, recruit for, and complain about. It not only gives me something to write about, but it also makes me smile at the lengths (and at times depths) people go to. One especially outstanding post was this one (read it carefully!):

PHOTOSHOP WIZ NEEDED ASAP

Date: 2008-09-23, 9:19AM CDT

I must say that this is a very creative requirement for someone’s graphic arts talents. Creative, but not very original. I did this when I was in college, sacrificing moral values for continued phone service in my dorm! I was friends at the time with a girl who lived at home with her very strict, very Catholic, and very nosy father. I’m sure that there were other people in the family that lived in the house, but her father made sure that it was classified information.

The opportunity came to me since she was dating a very much older navy man, who was very much married, with two very real kids … and she needed the phone bills (long distance since he was on tour A LOT!) to somehow not show up on her father’s home phone. The solution? Redirect all charges to our phone in the dorm, and then pay us the charges on a monthly basis. Brilliant!!! That way, dad is none the wiser, navy man is kept on-line, and my-then-friend continued to live in her world of elated denial. Like I said, brilliant. Right? Until one month when too many drinks and too many bars saw us short 50 dollars for the expenses we accrued.

And as we sat there wondering WHAT we could sell – except blood or organs – in our humble abode, the computer stared at us with a devilish grin. I wanted a car, but could only afford a COMPUTER. This is what it has come to. And so we did the unthinkable: we doctored the phone bill. No. I doctored the phone bill. adjusted charges just enough to be 50 dollars more than it should have been. All was well for weeks after the bill was paid. But then things didn’t match up. I didn’t do a good enough forensic job of doctoring the documents. Call times and call lengths didn’t jive … what was one to do?

Busted with a capital “b”. My then-friend, out of the deep secret she was keeping from her father, could not raise too much of a fuss or a ruckus.  And so she never spoke to me again. I was young, I had lots of disposable friends. I was stupid. I still had a working phone line. Last I heard, she and the navy guy didn’t last either!

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