Yesterday Tyra Banks announced a new reality show where aspiring fashion magazine editors competed for a job. We speculated that the show would be based around Elle, and we were right. Word on the street for awhile has been that editor Anne Slowey (who you may remember from the first season of Project Runway, where she was skinny and had white-blond hair and was kind of uptight) was jealous of colleague Nina Garcia’s fame as a PR judge and wanted a reality show of her own. Well, now she has one, even though she has to share it with Tyra. (And we all know how much Tyra likes to share.)
[Slowey is the fur-less one on the left.]
Considering how Anne Slowey treats her interns, this ought to be a hell of a show.
This list of “the worst things to say at work” is clearly aimed at us, because if it were aimed at bosses it would say stuff like “PICK UP MY DRY CLEANING NOW, YOU INCOMPETENT FOOL.” So here are some of the taboos:
- “Don’t tell anyone I said this, but … “
- “That’s not my job.”
- “Whom did you vote for?”
- “I got so trashed last night…”
- “I just didn’t have enough time for that.”
Agree or disagree? Since I’m hungover while writing this, and got so trashed last night, I’m not allowed to comment.
So my very first ever real world, rent paying, oh-my-god HOW-much-student-loan-debt-do-I-have job was as an exec admin assistant to the VP of Nameless Department (VPoND). Now VPoND was queen of ND and everyone bowed to her will. She naturally had her pet people, most of who were on the “special” side of the intelligence scale but they were mostly related to her so go figure. About 3 weeks after I started (again, VERY FIRST REAL JOB) Alpha Pet informed me it was Boss’s Day. The conversation went like this:
Alpha Pet: “Today is Boss’s Day. What did you get VPoND?”
Me: “…”
Alpha Pet: “Don’t tell me you forgot it was Boss’s Day! You didn’t even get her a card??”
Me: “There’s seriously such a thing as Boss’s Day? You’re not pulling my leg?”
Alpha Pet: “…”
Me: “Okay. The answer is ‘no’ then. My bad.”
Alpha Pet immediately runs to VPoND to tattle and 15 minutes later I was called in to VPoND’s office for a lecture on the importance of maintaining office morale with Alpha Pet lingering behind her chair and hanging on every word. Did I mention Alpha Pet was smirking the whole damn time? VPoND then tells me not to expect anything for Administrative Assistant’s Day to which I respond: “There’s an Administrative Assistant’s Day too? No way!” Oh to be so young and foolish again but I think my revealing of utter ignorance saved me from immediate firing. I still didn’t get VPoND anything on the following Boss’s Day. My bad. –Submitted by Sarah, Charleston
Tattooing (and tattooed) hottie Kat Von D is the star of TLC’s reality show L.A. Ink. She started as a cast member on Miami Ink and was chosen by the network to be the star of their spinoff show in California. I guess the fame thing’s working out well for her, since she now has an assistant–her sister. This makes Kat the latest of several celebrities to hire their sibling as their assistant. Kelly Clarkson employs her brother as her PA, and P3rez H1lton’s assistant is his sister Barbara. And I think we all remember Britney Spears’ “Cousin Alli.”
Tyra Banks may be annoying and kinda twitchy, but I have to give her props for creating a viable TV brand with America’s Next Top Model. Now, she’s teaming up with coproducer Ken Mok for a new show that will have aspiring fashion assistants competing for a job. The show, which will appear on the CW network in late spring or early summer, will feature aspiring fashion magazine editors creating pages for a mock publication and participating in group and team challenges. The show’s winner will get “a job in the fashion industry,” although it’s not clear exactly what that job will be.
Apparently, the show is looking for a real magazine to partner with. Maybe those rumors we’ve heard about an Elle magazine assistant reality show are going to pan out?
Normally, I get emails with titles like “Internet Tricks You Didn’t Know!” and just roll my eyes. But I have to admit that this list of Google tips was actually pretty useful and contained stuff I didn’t already know, such as:
- Remove Affiliate Links From Product Searches: To avoid seeing search results from certain sites, enter –site:website.com.
- Use Google as a Free Proxy: Enter cache:website.com to view a Web page that’s been blocked from the computer you’re using (this is useful for all of you who work in places that have banned this website)
- Search for Faces: If you’re looking for a photo of a person named Rose, and don’t want to see photos of the flower, add &imgtype=face to the end of your image search. It will show you only images of faces.
Read more here.
Just a few months ago, Hugh Hefner’s #1 girlfriend and Girls Next Door star Holly Madison got a “job” as a junior photo editor at Playboy. I figured the job was something to placate her with so she’ll stop begging Hef to have a baby with her. Now, not only is she being indulged with her fake job, she’s getting a fake assistant. The assistant, whose name we didn’t have time to catch in the two seconds she was onscreen, is a blonde Playmate who seems to have nothing to do beyond fetching packages and running errands for Holly. If anything, she’s just another shiny toy to distract Holly and make her feel like she has a real job besides sleeping with an old man and golddigging.
[Holly--in a photo she "edited"?]
I hate consultants. I feel like they get paid to stand around and tell people how to do their jobs differently-not better, just differently. And then they get paid a shitton of money. Anyway, my boss just hired the worst consultant ever. She’s a chair consultant. She gets paid money to tell people how they can sit in their chairs more comfortably. For extra, she adjusts your keyboard. WTF? My boss just can give me a couple thousand bucks and I’ll tell him to sit on a cushion. I get paid next to nothing for making his coffee just the way he likes it, but he pays some new age idiot a ton of money to move his keyboard around? I think I need to switch careers. –Submitted by Lindsay, Chicago
We’re thrilled with the number of comments our “What’s Your Mantra?” post got. We liked it so much, in fact, that we’re reprinting some of them here. You can still keep adding your comments to this post, and we’ll periodically post updates when new mantras come in.
- “Don’t take it personally.”
- “Mortgage-food-car, Mortgage-food-car”
- “The work will still be here tomorrow.”
- “This too shall pass. This too shall pass.”
- “This is not my life”
- “I’m not the pawn to your king.”
- “I love my mother-in-law, I love my mother-in-law” [because she's less awful than the boss, natch]
- “I get paid the same no matter what I do…”
I just found out that Celeb Staff magazine exists, and now that I’ve pulled myself away from vomiting, I want to share this horrifying thing with you. Celeb Staff bills itself as a publication “about managing mansions and estates and about the staff who provide services for high net-worth individuals.”
In the case of Celeb Staff, you can be not just an assistant but a personal chef, bodyguard, trainer, nanny, or butler. You may work in a fancy kitchen instead of a greasy restaurant, but that does not mean your boss is any more worthy of a human being. In fact, the major fucking Stockholm Syndrome the “editors” of this “magazine” seem to have is on par with Patty Hearst’s. The people writing these sad excuses for articles are either so far brainwashed they think they’re a famous person instead of someone who cleans up after a famous person or bosses who write this magazine under aliases so they can convince their employees that working for them is some kind of a fucking privilege. Reading this drivel is like reading prison inmates write about how comforting they find the sweet peacefulness of solitary confinement.
Dear Readers of Celeb Staff,
Your boss is famous, you are not. Your boss is rich, you are not. And while you do get to accompany your boss on exotic vacations, it is so you can babysit their kids and clean up after their drug binges, not so you can lie around on the beach. Taking pride in your work is one thing, but being delusional is another.
Best wishes,
STA
