The printout isn’t a Missed Connection, but I find it emblematic of many of the posts present on the forum: part love letter, part scream into the void, and deeply personal to the Bay Area. Tiny and nostalgic and electric with longing, each one feels like the beginning of a rom-com that will be inevitably abandoned midway through production.
“Our motivation is simply that this is something that happened to all of us,” said Craigslist founder Craig Newmark of the idea behind Missed Connections to the New York Times in 2005. He cited the name as a transportation metaphor: when a passenger misses part of the leg of a journey due to delays or errors or other issues.