Recently, I headed to New York, and I needed a place to stay cheap and fast. I didn’t want to fool with a hostel again. Not, so much because I’m against staying in hostels. Good night of sleep and room to iron was important for the job interview. There aren’t many flat surfaces in a hostel that New Zealanders aren’t having sex on at any given moment.
So I did what I always do and shook the Internet until something fell out. On a tip from the Matador Network (a good one not something on saving money by staying in a chicken coop or harnessing the power of New Zealand hostel orgies to smite whalers), I found out about a site where I can find apartments to stay in.
It was near Times Square and was conveniently close to the interview. I knew from the site that the owner was going to be out of town that week. I scaled the elevator shaft with my grapple and tried the lock against my picks.
Inside I was greeted by an enthusiastic young man who was playing the piano and handed me a set of keys. In my dsylexia I had read the website as AirBNE dot com not AIRBNB dot com as in Bed and Breakfast. I was not in fact buying information on houses to break into, but renting the room for three days. A much easier arrangement.
I mentioned this to a friend, and it was this point she fixated on about my whole trip. (That and whether or not I used the Ninja bathroom. I wasn’t aware that was a thing, but it is.) It struck some kind of OCD nerve. So I thought maybe some of her concerns about AirBNB are shared by others. So I’ll address some of them here:
Continue reading In Which I Break into an Apartment and Live in It…
