Lately, I’ve found myself responding to several advertisements on Craigslist. There seem to be a lot of people who could benefit from my services, and I take the time to respond to each of their listings with a customized note explaining what I can do to help and the best ways to contact me. The other day I even put my own listing up on a similar website in an attempt to solicit collaboration from the WordPress development community. I realize now that both of these services might not be the best in the world.
There’s too much automation involved.
I’ve received five responses to my WordPress post thus far. Each of them is a form-letter highlighting qualifications, linking to sample websites, and presenting a project budget. Ironically, I stated several times in my post that this is a non-paying collaborative project, but I still get the “we can finish your project on a small budget of just $10/hr” emails. They’re automatically generated and probably sent as a response to each and every post on the site.
Which is depressing considering the amount of time I spend crafting a custom response to each post.
The Craigslist situation was even more intriguing. I spent about 30 minutes building a custom proposal, complete with a cost and time breakdown, and sent it to the automatically-generated anonymous Craigslist email address. About two minutes later, the mail daemon kicked the message back to me claiming the client didn’t exist.
This was odd considering it was Craigslist’s computer telling my its own email address didn’t work.
We live in a world increasingly dependent on technology to run our day-to-day lives. Job applications are all online nowadays. Customer support is frequently handled via email or an automated phone system. You can even order a pizza with your computer! It heavily discounts any personal flair placed on communication and makes me somewhat miss the days when you spent a day or two crafting a message before hand-writing it and mailing it to a friend.
Now email is automatic, Twitter is faster than a phone call, and even classified ads are handled on both ends by a computer. Considering I work in technology I should be excited by this inevitable paradigm shift. Then again, the part of me that enjoys mundane tasks like writing a letter by hand cries a little each time I see these changes.
