Craig, I Want Off Your List

Melissa called me on Friday. I couldn't answer because I was at work. She left a message and told me that she would love to watch my kid on Wednesdays from 6-9, and she left me her number and asked me to call her back. There were a lot of candidates really, from young to old, but all of them were female. The most qualified and top runner for the position was Karissa, who graduated with honors from Berkley, is trilingual, can cook, clean, has great references and agreed to a meeting before hire. I can honestly say, it wasn't a tough decision for me to make in regards to any of them.

You see, I'm not married, I didn't just recently move to California, and I don't have a kid. If I did have a kid I certainly wouldn't pay someone $150 dollars to watch them once a week for three hours. I felt bad that I couldn't hire any of them, because they all wanted the job and Berkley was obviously the best choice. But I can't hire someone for a job that didn't exist.

Melissa was helpful enough to inform me that she got my info on Craigslist, and so I googled "Craigslist (And my phone-number)." I found the article about my wife and kid and moving to long beach. Phone number and name was correct and everything. My phone continued to ring, and eventually died. When I got home from work I plugged it in to find that I had 30 voicemails. About 10 voicemails in, the messages started to sound like this, "Hey, I'm interested in the Ford F-150 you have for sale. Is $250 dollars the correct amount or is that a typo?" The last twenty messages, and about 30 texts were about the truck.

I got a great lead when someone said they were referenced to me by my roommate Lance. A text came in from him from a few hours ago that read: How is your day going? I replied: Interesting that you ask, how is yours? We talked on the phone and he admitted to the Long Beach Babysitting Craigslist ad, saying that he and Flu came up with it. He asked how I found out, and I told him that someone mentioned his name in the truck messages. He told me that he knew I had posted the Truck ad on facebook to get him back. I hadn't. Someone had posted a truck ad on Lance's behalf, and thinking it was me, he made his answering machine say, "Hi you've reached Lance, if you are calling on behalf of the truck please contact Sean at #." He told me he had gotten 80 calls in 90 minutes.

We knew it was Flu, so Lance changed his answering machine to Flu instead of me. Flu eventually called me, asking why he was getting calls about a Truck, and after a long arguing match, he proved to me he didn't post the ad about Lance. Turns out one of Lance's friends did, who Flu and I hardly even know. I laughed a lot that day. It was a very fun April Fools day, to say the least.

I am still getting phone calls about the Truck.