     | september 8, 2010
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| september 8, 2010
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Moses on Moses Itamar Moses -- 11/09/2005  [ 1 ][ 2 ]What did you do when you got here? First I worked as a theatre intern, and then, when I ran out of money, as an office temp, for a year. I temped for an organization that was fully aware that most of its temps were aspiring writers and actors and whatever, so they claimed to be able to cater to our interests. All this turned out to mean was that I would be in a cubicle, filling out spreadsheets, in the finance office of Radio City Music Hall, or Madison Square Garden, as opposed to at, say, Pfizer, or a law firm. I would sit at my little desk at Radio City, typing in numbers, trying to think of an excuse to go down the hall, past the room where the Rockettes were rehearsing, with the door open. Good times. Or, I would go into my boss’s office at MSG and tell him that some numbers weren’t tying out (this is the kind of finance terminology that still clutters my brain) at the bottom of a spreadsheet, and he’d be like, “Oh, just add forty thousand dollars to the miscellaneous column.” Any amount below six digits was meaningless. I’d type in these enormous numbers, and take home my eighteen dollars an hour. At one point, I worked for a month at Nickelodeon Jr. Magazine. I lied and told them I knew how to make graphs and charts with Excel, and spent most of my first day figuring out how to do that. Then I made these big colorful graphs about how Nickelodeon Junior “reaches more tweens!” than Sports Illustrated for Kids. Tweens are that coveted demographic between eleven-and-a-half and twelve-and-five-eighths. Or something. Also, I had to call all the winners of this contest the magazine had, to tell them what they’d won. I had to call the homes of all these eight year old kids, but it was during the day, so somebody’s mom would be like, “Daniel is eight years old. He’s at school. What do you want with him?” So I was the creepy pedophile prize patrol. I work at a firm called ExcitePR for a week. It was during the Budweiser “Whazzup?” campaign, and all the PR people I was working for were blown away by what a good campaign it was, and they’d go onto the internet to look for the newest installments, and then shake their heads with quiet awe. It’s kind of amazing that I didn’t kill myself. Oh, I also worked at iBeauty.com for a week. Back then, they were in, like, an abandoned warehouse in the west twenties, with a hand-crank elevator. All these twenty and thirty something women spent the day airbrushing photos of models. Somebody would have a birthday party, and the chocolate cake would sit there, uneaten, on a table, all day. It was hysterical. I mean: sad. I would probably write a revelatory series of essays about that year, but there’s already a David Sedaris. It says here that you went to graduate school. Where. What? It says that where, exactly? On…this. You’re not holding anything. Did you go to graduate school? end of page 3 [ 3 ] read more ... [ 4 ][ 5 ][ 6 ][ 7 ] |
