Welcome to Fairview Plaza Co-Op. We pride ourselves on fostering a vibrant community of young professionals, families, and retirees. We are looking forward to getting to know you not just as a tenant, but as a person.

1. Please provide copies of your driver’s license, social security number, birth certificate, and detailed notes from the last three months of your therapy appointments. We can tell if you’re faking.

2. Kindly attach reference letters from your employer, a trusted adult who has known you for more than five years, your dentist, and the doctor that delivered you. Please note if you were born by cesarean.

3. Between the reference letter from your employer and the doctor who delivered you, slip in a crisp twenty-dollar bill.

4. If applying with a guarantor, we ask that you send along all said guarantor’s bank statements since 1992, and a five-paragraph essay on why their twenty-four-year-old child has no credit and $25K in student loans for a journalism degree.

5. Please wear shoes.

6. Attach two years of signed income tax returns, detailed memos explaining gaps in employment, sudden illnesses or improv classes.

7. W2 signed by all members of U2.

8. Schedule your interview with the co-op board on a business day between the hours of 9 a.m. and 9:12 a.m. Arrive three hours early.

9. Upon arriving for your interview no less than six hours early, you will be blindfolded and spun around forty-three times. Then you have to get to the Park Slope Food Co-Op and back without vomiting. We’re out of carrots.

10. You will be escorted to a private kitchen where Gordon Ramsay has been searing scallops for thirty-six hours. Give him the carrots. If you make Gordon Ramsay cry before he makes you cry, we’ll waive the move-in fee.

11. Bring your own showerhead.

12. When you and Gordon Ramsay are both in tears and have spent the night commiserating over your eerily similar high school bullying experiences, you will be picked up by an unmarked van and knocked unconscious.

13. You are not in Squid Game, but we did steal this part from Squid Game.

14. You will come to in a deserted parking lot on the outskirts of Skaneateles, New York.

15. Take in the beautiful sunset while you bask in the regret of not just moving to Hoboken.

16. If you ask us how to pronounce “Skaneateles,” we will go full Squid Game.

17. The driver of the van takes off his ski mask. It’s Bono from U2. He presents you with your quest.

18. Bono tells you that you must retrieve a golden wrench from Bob’s Hardware. There’s a screw loose in Linda’s apartment and she won’t shut up about it.

19. In order to be granted entry into Bob’s Hardware, you must correctly answer three riddles from the Sphinx.

20. The Sphinx is a thirteen-year-old rottweiler-chihuahua mix named Gordon Ramsay.

21. He will bite only if provoked.

22. The Sphinx is easily provoked.

23. The prophecy completed, Bono dissolves into the night, Ray-Bans clattering to the ground.

24. At the entrance of Bob’s Hardware, you are greeted by rottweiler-chihuahua Gordon Ramsay.

25. You must perfectly sear three scallops in order to reveal the code to the safe that Bob’s golden wrench is kept in.

26. These are not real scallops. Mind-scallops, if you will. You must search deep within your soul to find the words that will sear them.

27. Don’t screw this up (wrench humor). With every minute you take, your landlord raises the rent by fifty dollars.

28. Upon retrieval of the golden wrench, hurry back to Manhattan. You’re late for a second interview we never told you about.

29. Stop at CityMD. Gordon Ramsay bit you (the human).

30. Don’t forget proof of renter’s insurance, life insurance, cashier’s check of one month’s rent, and a refrigerator for the super’s office.

31. We look forward to reviewing your application! Expect a reply in five to forty-seven business days.