A Parable: Craigslist and the Untruthful Canadian

Finding a new roommate is a pain.  It really is.  In DC, living with roommates is kind of a necessity as housing prices are so expensive that I drop every month what would constitute a mortgage payment on a home back in the Midwest to live with three other people in a townhouse in the ghetto a questionable neighborhood.   


To find new roommates, most of us use Craigslist.  Overall the results are great.  The process however, (and there’s no other way to put this) sucks.  You have to get the house in viewing shape, you have to block time to meet people, you have to deal with the inevitable no-shows (side-note: this is fucking rude—the least you can do is send a text or an email with a little bit more than an hour’s notice saying you’re not coming; common decency people!), you have to tolerate weird people who come to see the house and then refuse to leave (see e.g. the girl whose pet peeve was people flushing the toilet), and the like.  In all of the Craigslist roommate misadventures I’ve been through, my roommates and I just suffered the worst breach of Craigslist etiquette that gets to take the cake.  Grab your Snuggie and a beverage because boys and girls, it’s story time. 


In search of a new roommate, my roommates and I were looking for the best fit, (as in any relationship) and we didn’t think we had found that yet.  In walks Connie the Cannuck.  (This obviously isn’t her real name, but she was Canadian and I think it’s clever and if you don’t well that’s your problem not mine.  So there.) Connie seems very cool—she’s fun, we bond over Labatts Blue and Windsor, Canada (a rite of passage for all 18 year-olds from the Great Lakes region). Indeed, it seemed like we had found our match.  A few days later she invited us to happy hour to get to know her better; it truly seemed meant to be.    But, as seems to be par for the course with me, once things were looking good, suddenly, they took a turn for the worst.


Connie the Cannuck dropped off the face of the earth.  She wouldn’t return our emails, wouldn’t return our texts, and wouldn’t return our phone calls.  In short, we were confused and jilted.  


Then, eight days out from the first of the month, when our rent is due (in full) I get a call from our landlords. Connie the Cannuck had lied about having a full-time job and instead of owning up to us like an adult over email or a text or a phone call (God forbid!) that she could not afford to live in our house, bitch chicken scratched some note to our landlords, drove out to Vienna, VA and dropped it in their mailbox when they were out of town, telling them she wasn’t going to move in.  


A handwritten note?!  Seriously!?!?!?  PLEASE!!!!  You want to know the last time I put together a handwritten note with bad news on it?  I think it was in middle school and I was dropping it in a girl’s locker telling her she couldn’t sit with us at lunch anymore.  And that was immature even then!!!  I expected more out of a person and even more out of a Canadian (though as a friend pointed out, after the Vancouver riots, I don’t think I know them at all anymore!).  


Like an episode of Glee, I like to end with a moral of the story.  Here, the moral is: act like an adult when you’re dealing with other adults.  Don’t lie and if you do and are caught, own up to it.  If you don’t, you getting a nasty-gram courtesy of yours truly and I write them for a living, so believe me, you’ll be crying.