This Craigslist job
posting for a “personal assistant” came across my Twitter feed Wednesday,
and it’s taken me all this time to plumb the depths of its narcissism and
oblivion.
Even with the help of
the lengthy stream of comments on the original poster’s feed.
Here was the original
posting (since amended, which I’ll get to in a bit). I broke it down into chunks; if you click on each, and then click on the resulting screen, it should enlarge so you can actually read it. I can't believe these people got all this verbiage in a Craigslist ad:
A few thoughts:
They have nothing against sloths, but no dry senses of humor need apply? Are
they fearful that someone might be mocking them if they think something funny
was said, but they have no visual or auditory clues to that effect? I think
they might be…
Happy to clean up dog shit and diarrhea; that seems a little
unreasonable. Willing, I understand, but if I came across someone who was happy to do that, I’d frankly steer
clear of him/her. As for the ability to lift a 40-pound dog up several flights
of stairs, that seems like a red flag. There’s not an elevator in their SoMa
abode?
It’s okay to be fashion
forward, but leave room for the dog’s potty bags in your pocket. Huh. I guess
that means that a fanny pack wouldn’t do it? Because there’d be room for the
potty bags, but that’s totes not
fashionable, y’know? I also wonder about the single hour a day scheduled for
cleaning. Maybe their fifth-floor walk-up is very, very tiny?
(Someone on Twitter also
called out the one hour per day that was Doodle-the-dog time:)
Also, their limit of
five drinks per week seems unrealistic, given the list of duties and expected
requirements. As everyone on Twitter pointed out, you work for these whackjobs,
you need to drink.
Not quite getting most
of the “bonus” characteristics, like:
Multilingual—what languages
would these be, I wonder?
Knowledge of how to brush
tangled hair without causing pain, starts down to Creepy Town, but it shifted
into overdrive with “enjoy giving mani/pedis”.
The full spectrum of
cookery seems quite ambitious for someone only being paid around $20/hour (the
scale kept going down, and then up, but even the top end is below what a good
cook gets), especially when that person is also cleaning, dog rescuing,
providing personal protection, running errands, detangling hair, negotiating
contracts, and a manicurist. Also, who’s up to date on GoT and Silicon Valley.
As you read through
this Russian-novel-long posting, it’s interesting the number of times the
writers insist that an applicant be willing to admit s/he is “not perfect”, “can
own up to mistakes”, etc. And by “interesting” I mean “pathological”. At no
time is there mention that they themselves might not be capable of doing the
same.
Well, of course you
have to jump through a serious of mindless hoops to apply for this job
(including making a five-minute video explaining how you meet 100% of the
requirements; yes, 100%), but the good news is they’re interviewing daily.
Now, here are a few
interesting nuggets:
The original posting
listed an hourly rate of $25-$35/hour. Which is certainly more than minimum
wage, even in San Francisco. But it’s nowhere near what a top-notch PA gets,
much less the dog wrangler, cook, meal planner, contract negotiator, body guard
and all the rest of it.
And there is no mention
of PTO or health insurance.
But throughout
yesterday, the ad was apparently amended a couple of times, lowering the wage
twice before raising it to a wider range.
And the last time I
looked at the posting, they’d also included a very interesting datum about what
they do that makes them unable to have a life:
They’re in biotech,
folks. They’re #PharmaBro, x 2.
,
We can only hope that whoever takes this job doesn't give them enough time to reproduce.
And someone should
rescue that dog. From them.
