What does one do on a rainy afternoon in a city where you haven’t made many friends yet? Watch Netflix documentaries of course! And if you’re me and have already made it through an embarassing number of Netflix documentaries, you turn to Amazon Prime streaming. This is where I found Craigslist Joe.
With only a laptop computer, cell phone, toothbrush and the clothes on his back, Joseph Garner sets out to survive for 31 days solely on items gleaned from Craigslist.
Not only does Joe survive, he meets dozens of pretty cool (some super strange) people all willing to help him out. He ends up taking a cross country trip and restoring his faith in humanity and the internet.
About a week later, in a stroke of brilliance (and irony given my last post about how my loans are #worthit), I decided to try the same thing. If Joe could survive and trek cross country just using the good will of the people of Craigslist, surely I could find some people who wanted to help me pay back my student loans! right?!
Don’t worry mom, I was safe about it.
I fired up my laptop and logged on to Craigslist. The first step, was to carefully think about which board on the site it would be most appropriate to post my plea. I settled on the Volunteers board and posted the following message:
Help a College Grad??
Calling all people looking to do a good deed:I’m just throwing this out into the universe to see if there is any kind of karmic goodness out there that might help me out. I have a few thousand dollars of student loans left and I’m wondering if the good people of craigslist want to help me pay them off.Anything that you could send my way would be AH-mazing. My goal for 2016 is to pay them off completely.Venmo me? I have faith in you, good people of the internet! Every penny counts!!!!
I didn’t have high expectation for this message. At all. Rightfully so…. my little experiment failed miserably.
For the first 24 hours, as I expected, nothing came of this at all. But after accepting defeat, I received a message! Maybe someone wants to give me money just because!! (HAH. yeah right) Instead I cautiously opened the e-mail to find the following encouraging message from Cheryl:
Get a job and pay it off yourself
Thanks Cheryl! I never thought of that plan….
Still I was encouraged by actually getting a response! Someone actually read my message!! (I know, I know, at this point you are thinking “gees, how naive could one human being possibly be??”)
Then John W messaged me.
Are you willing to do anything for some cash to pay off your loan? I don’t want to offend you i am just putting it out there just like you did. I can help u out
Reality check. Pretty sure John just propositioned me….
That was definitely NOT what I was going for.At this point I decided to accept defeat and admit that this plan never ever would have worked.
So Craigslist didn’t renew my faith in humanity like it did for Joe. Womp. That being said…. if anyone still wants to donate to SHAME (Shamelessly Hoping for Anonymous Money Endeavor) let me know!
Are you my Spirit Animal? 