Recently, a man posted an all-kinds-of-crazy ad on Craigslist, offering his services as your new dog walker. It started with, “HEY RICH-DOG OWNERS” and only got better from there — or worse, if you were trying to hire a new dog walker. It reminded us wholly of Jean Ralphio from Parks and Recreation. It was a very fun read:
But, as with many things on the Internet, it was quickly revealed that the ad was not on the level. But it was on the level at one time! Yesterday, a man, Yahoo News Tech Editor Jason O. Gilbert, came forward and said that he wrote and posted the ad — four years ago. He said that he had no money and wanted a job. He said that the person who posted the ad last week is a sham, a fraud, a plagiarist.
Fine, whatever — nothing on the Internet is real. We get it. Bad dog-walking ad plagiarist.
What we want to know, as people with a professional interest in the effectiveness of insane dog-walking ads, is: How’d the ad do?
When I wrote the Craigslist dog-walking ad, I was fresh out of college and broke: staying on a friend’s couch in Queens, supplementing bowls of Ramen with peanut butter, brushing my teeth with 50-cent toothpaste, walking great distances to avoid paying for the subway. I wrote I WILL WALK YOUR DOG because I needed money, and I had heard that dog-walking in New York City was lucrative. So, in a maelstrom of adrenaline, I fired off a Craigslist ad offering my services to the well-coiffed one percent, in the hopes that some NYC dog owner with a sense of humor might see it, respect the jokes, and pay me a little cash to pet-sit.
And?
I received no dog-walking offers.
What? No! We can’t believe nobody wanted a dog walker who was not a weirdo art-school dropout, who would not jack your electronics or bathe in your foie gras or talk to your dog in sub-verbal communication, but who would be swagged out, make your dog’s nipples hard, eat your apple, and cry when he picks up your dog’s poop, wearing his letterman’s sweater, thinking your sidewalks are stupid and that your dog wants to have sex with him.
The ad did, however, get him a job in the media, a fact that still has several low-level Paris Review editors spinning in their graves, these four years later.
First the ad appeared on Reddit, then the Daily What, then the Huffington Post, then the Someecards blog, and then Gilbert just put the damn thing on his resume, which got him an internship at Nerve and then a full-time job at HuffPo, all within two months after he posted the ad.
In short, his ad for dog walking got him a job at Huffington Post. Nice hire.
As for the guy who stole the four-year-old ad and posted it: What are you doing? Is this your life? Go do something else.
Via Yahoo News
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