A part of my dead soul is in an office on 33rd street.  It was an internship for a teensy production company that did commercials like the Jennifer Hudson thing where she gets all sassy about losing weight and those spiffy reels for universities that make them look like NASA.  This was real movie business shit.  No pay for you, bitch. 

I should’ve turned away when I found out that they also work on that magazine where they list the income of every legal occupation in the country.  We all know how they accumulate that information, don’t we?  Eager, gleamy-eyed interns who have no idea what sadistic nightmare awaits them…  

“Hey Micael, we need phone numbers for cobblers from Montanta, ice road truckers from Alaska, and tattoo artists from Iowa…  and like don’t stop.”  

Sure thing.  Let me just sit down at the little intern sweat shop (a row of iMacs set in a small, dark, under-ventilated room) and rape Google like a homeless hooker.  I did that seven hours a day for one whole semester, yes ma’am.  (I must say that Google happens to be a sad place when you’re not looking up movie showtimes.)  In between my violent sessions of banging out command-c and command-v, my supervisor was nice enough to allow me to buy printer ink.  What a doll, right?  I was later bestowed with such responsibilities as creating databases for every sound studio and caterer in the city.  At that point, life was slightly better than the lives of the immigrant women working in the same building a hundred years ago.  Ah, what students will do for a few credits.

In a sick way, it truly was a “valuable learning experience” as my professors put it.  Yes… the same way getting kidnapped and then plopped into the sex trade is.