Craigslist: Lesson in Sociology, or Heart of Darkness?

I know you are slavering in anticipation of my latest catch-up novella. Here it is; you're welcome!

Sam--bartender flatmate--decided to move out with his girlfriend, causing M. to stop speaking with him for weeks. The Frenchy flatmates can't stand living with us anymore, so they're going back to France early March. To "practice their art" or something. Have I mentioned that the Frenchies and the Sam/girlfriend axis couldn't stand one another either? I can't say I'm devastated to see this particular arrangement reach its end.

Apparently we have no friends left--or none interested in living with us, anyway--because it became clear after a month or so that we would have to resort to Craigslist for the 3rd time. Perhaps we truly are as loathsome as our current housemates would have you think. Anyhow, M. was busy, so the secretarial task of coordinating Craigslist meetings fell to me.

Too bad I am a social disaster. I don't think I can adequately describe how much stress the whole ordeal caused me. I couldn't sleep. At work, I couldn't concentrate on my job. Possibly one hour's worth of work was done in those several days. Instead, I sent or received maybe a hundred emails last week. Then, after the interviews were over and it was time to start dishing out rejections, I began shunning email altogether. Every person we interviewed, save two, emailed me back telling us how great we were, how great the apartment was, how much they loved our cats, how well they sensed we got along with them, and of course, why we ought to choose them as our housemates. One guy attached a picture of his cat. A few offered to pay more in rent if we'd only accept them. How would I reject all these kind people who knew where we lived? What if we saw them around? Do we say we reject you because we find your voice grating, or because we just like someone else better? I couldn't make myself respond to these people. Merely skimming through their emails filled me with a measure of horror. When I did sleep, I had Craigslist nightmares. Finally I caved in and asked M. to respond to the emails for me. He thought I was nuts; he didn't see what the issue was, but he wrote the rejections in a matter of minutes, and lo!--I could sleep again.

Yes, I do have a problem.

Once I get past the feelings of dread, I can appreciate our Craigslist experience as a lesson on social groups. I don't know what it was about the cues we included in our ad--price? likes and dislikes? the way we described ourselves?--but the people we interviewed were a demographically homogenous bunch. All college grads: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cambridge, MIT, Stanford. All white, more or less. Mostly male. Most worked for tech companies or did research.

We interviewed two girls. One of them, it turns out, not only went to our alma mater but also graduated the same year as we did, and lived in my co-op while I was "studying"(ha) in Italy. We even have mutual friends.

As I said, two of the people we interviewed did not write us back begging to live with us. One of these happens to be a post-doc in the department where M.'s a ph.d. candidate. His parents are also faculty here, and he was a high-school classmate of M.'s good friend (the one who is also my boss's daughter).

In sum, I have learned that when you post an ad on Craigslist, the responses you get will be from a random sample of the local population. Further, when we go about picking roommates, how close they are to our social group has nothing to do with our decision.

Which two people do you think we picked?