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Man trading up from paper clip to house
What a long, strange trip it's been — so far
 | Kyle MacDonald, is a young Montreal man who is using the power of the internet to trade up a paper clip to a house. |
David Boily / AP |
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Kyle MacDonald had a red paper clip and a dream: Could he use the community power of the Internet to barter that paper clip for something better, and trade that thing for something else — and so on and so on until he had a house?
After a cross-continental trading trek involving a fish-shaped pen, a town named Yahk and the Web's astonishing ability to bestow celebrity, MacDonald is getting close. He's up to one year's free rent on a house in Phoenix.
Not a bad return on an investment of one red paper clip. Yet MacDonald, 26, vows to keep going until he crosses the threshold of his very own home, wherever that might be.
"It's totally overwhelming, I'm not going to lie," he said by phone from Montreal, where he and his girlfriend, Dominique Dupuis, live with two roommates. "But I'm still trading for that house. It's this obsessive thing."
The story begins last July.
MacDonald had spent years backpacking, delivering pizzas and working other part-time jobs, suiting his jack-of-all-trades, restless nature. He paid his $300 share of the rent by occasionally promoting products at trade shows.
But he yearned for one piece of settled-down adulthood: a house, which he knew he could not afford.
It's clear, however, that MacDonald has a knack for promotion. Asked what he had talked up at all those trade shows, MacDonald slipped right into his spiel for the employer, TableShox.com. "You ever sat at a wobbly table at a restaurant?" he said.
Beyond a gift for advertising table stabilizers, he's a geography buff, keeps a blog and writes short stories. Random interactions with strangers and the rich kitsch of North Americana provide his favorite material.
Put it all together, and you have the outline of MacDonald's quest.
He advertised it in the barter section of Craigslist.org, the Web site teeming with city-specific listings for everything from job openings to apartment rentals. At first, MacDonald said merely that he wanted something bigger or better for his red paper clip. No mention of a house — he feared seeming flaky.
While he was visiting his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, two women gave him a fish-shaped pen for the paper clip.
Later that day, MacDonald headed to Seattle to catch a ballgame and a flight home. Before the airport, though, he stopped to see Annie Robbins, an artist who had just stumbled upon the Craigslist barter section. She admired its anti-consumerist vibe, she said, so she answered MacDonald's posting "on a lark."
MacDonald left her home the proud owner of a small ceramic doorknob with a smiley face, made by the son of an artist Robbins knows.
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