Classified of the Week: Seeking British Butler

Beijing's diversity and Internet anonymity make for strange bedfellows. Nowhere is this more true than in our website's Classified Ads section. We've seen it all – and then some. And that doesn't even cover the ads we must disapprove because they just aren't fit for a good, clean, wholesome website like ours. So each week, we're shining a spotlight on one of the current live ads.

Like this one:

Can you tell the difference between a salad fork and a dinner fork? Does your alma mater include the likes of The British Butler Institute? Do you have an accent that would put Fresh Prince’s Geoffrey to shame? Then your services are requested.

The folks behind this classified say they need a couple of “professional British Butlers” to man their “Super Deluxe Hotels and Deluxe Villas” in Guiyang. British Butlers with training and experience in, of course, Britain, are “most welcome.” Whether or not they’re serious about that being British stipulation is up in the air, but if the weirdly race-specific ads we’ve seen before are any indication, we wouldn’t put it past them.

For those non-British butlers, I guess you can always affect an accent for the job interview. Fake it until you make it, right?