Nate Silver, the stats genius behind the website www.fivethirtyeight.com, which tracks current poll numbers and translates that into potential electoral votes for the presidential candidates, does not have an assistant. [Note: Silver is also the brains who runs baseballprospectus.com, which I have to mention or else my boyfriend would kill me.] According to the Bend Bulletin, one of the many publications eager to find out more about he mysterious but brilliant Silver:
Nate Silver’s political rags-to-riches story plays out on a BlackBerry brimming with e-mails and a schedule conspiring to run him into the ground.Last spring he was a sports statistics savant virtually unknown outside the world of obsessive baseball fans. Now he dreams about hiring a personal assistant.
Hear that, baseball junkies and policy wonks? Now’s the time to send in your resume! Get to him now before the election ends and his schedule frees up.
This Halloween the scariest thing in your office is not your boss’ annual Star Wars-themed costume (last year, Yoda; this year, Princess Leia in the gold bikini), it’s the plague going from one employee to the next and striking without warning. I just started at a new job and, although no one else is sick, I have a big gross autumn head cold. My friend Kimba reminded me that I got sick the last time I started a new job, and I’m starting to think it’s one of those things where you have to get used to the resident germs at your new office.
Do you have the office plague? Is it a seasonal thing or does one jerk who insists on coming to work with a hacking cough to prove how ‘dedicated’ they are ruin it for everyone? Let me know in the comments. Or if you have some good alternative cold remedies, I’d also love to hear them.
Victoria “Posh” Beckham, who was totally always my favorite Spice Girl, is actually kind of awesome despite sometimes dressing like an alien. In this very endearing clip from her Coming to America special, Posh and her assistant, Renee, try to bake a pie that Posh can bring to a “welcome to the neighborhood” party she got invited to. Renee is hilarious and a great complement to her boss.
Tracey Morgans (not to be confused with the very funny 30 Rock star Tracy Morgan) has won the title of Wales’ Top Assistant. Tracey is 38, married with two kids, and lives in a town called Caerphilly. She’s the PA to John Phillips, managing director of commercial finance specialists Kingswood Associates Ltd. In an interview with Wales Online she has some interesting things to say about the nature of her job: namely, that she never intended to be a PA and wound up in the position by surprise. “I have been a PA now for about 3½ years. It wasn’t originally the job that I’d applied for,” she said, “I thought I was applying for an accounts role which gradually combined into a PA role.”
I feel like everything ‘gradually combines into a PA role’. Maybe running this website has made me grumpy and bitter, but it bugs me how jobs that have little or nothing to do with administrative work end up becoming de facto assistant jobs when companies ‘cut costs’ by firing people and creating combo jobs or because everyone passes the buck until the most recent hire gets saddled with admin stuff regardless of whether it’s in their job description.
I’m proud of Tracey and all, and she sounds sweet, but the other problem I have with this article? The title: “Having a Fantastic Boss Really Helps.” Yes, it does help, but why can’t you use a title that a) explains what the hell the article is about, and b) mentions the assistant for once instead of the boss? Jeez.
Everybody has their guilty pleasure TV show. For some people, it’s Gossip Girl (and some aren’t even guilty about their love for the show). For others it’s America’s Next Top Model and whatever wacky shit Tyra does next. Mine is that bottom-of-the-barrel breeding ground for washed up/never was reality show famewhores, The Real World/Road Rules Challenge. This year, the show features the cast of said drunken, hooking-up-constantly types on an island where they have limited food and water but unlimited booze. MTV’s online presence for the show, though, hasn’t been such a success.
Forum poster (and reliable spoiler-poster) Hadrian1 recently posted the following on all-knowing TV site Television Without Pity:
Certainly MTV’s attempt at creativity, iamonmtv.com is an unmitigated failure. Almost no one in the RW/RR family save starved-for-attention and self-esteem Robin [ed note: that's her in the bikini] posts there, largely because MTV is to cheap to compensate their casts. This year they even had interns post as the cast at the start of the season. That failed too.
Ahh, the summer college internship. I worked one summer at the local arts council learning how to write grants. You come in for a month or two, get some practical experience, wear clothes that make you feel like you’re playing dress-up with your mom’s outfits, get a recommendation letter, and go back to your life. Right?
Well, for one intern at KTSP-TV in Minneapolis/St. Paul, that was not to be. Police were called to the studio one night when a female intern (whose name has not been released) went apeshit at the office:
St. Paul police were called to KSTP-TV about 7:15 p.m. on Oct. 13 to deal with “an intern [who] was out of control. It was determined that intern had been disruptive, threatening and damaged property,” states the “public narrative” of a police report.
No charges have been filed against the intern, whom I reached by phone on Sunday to ask about the run-in with executive producer Danielle Prenevost.
When asked whether it was true that she had chased a manager around the newsroom, the intern said, “No comment.” You didn’t chase Danielle, I persisted? “No comment,” said the intern. “I’ll talk to you later.”
Mad Men embodies everything we romanticize about the 1960s: full-figured women in tight-fitting dresses, three martini lunches, and the old-fashioned office that didn’t have computers, fax machines, email, conference calls, or excel spreadsheets. Now, on the heels of the show’s Emmy win and the end of season 2, Entertainment Weeklygets a peek inside the set of the most glamorous office on TV.
Hint: it’s cooler than any place where you’ve ever worked.
Move over, Sean Avery, alt-rocker Ryan Adams (he’ll always be “the guy from Whiskeytown” to me) has landed his very own magazine internship. Luckily, Avery gets fashion to himself for the time being, since Adams is ‘interning’ at culture mag BlackBook. Apparently, Adams made the deal that he would intern for a magazine in exchange for some free press for his new album.
I imagine that, like Avery, Adams isn’t really going to do anything intern-related like fetch coffee or shlep stuff all over town. More likely he’ll come in, get introduced to lots of staff members, and do some sort of ridiculous slide show on the website full of pictures of him doing fake intern things. What hath Sean Avery wrought? It’s a good thing he got traded to Dallas or I might have to chase him down.
Ever wondered what it’s like to be a production assistant on the set of a porn movie? Yeah, me neither, but now one brave assistant takes you through a typical day for him.
[Note: genitals may be blurred out, but this clip is still NSFW.]
Hey…thanks for all the emails about difficulties leaving comments on posts. Some of you complained that in order to leave a comment you had to have a wordpress account, or that you got an error message saying that commenting was “locked.” Thanks for the heads-up, and you should now be able to comment your hearts out.
Nate Silver, the stats genius behind the website www.fivethirtyeight.com, which tracks current poll numbers and translates that into potential electoral votes for the presidential candidates, does not have an assistant. [Note: Silver is also the brains who runs baseballprospectus.com, which I have to mention or else my boyfriend would kill me.] According to the Bend Bulletin, one of the many publications eager to find out more about he mysterious but brilliant Silver:
Tracey Morgans (not to be confused with the very funny 
Everybody has their guilty pleasure TV show. For some people, it’s Gossip Girl (and some aren’t even guilty about their love for the show). For others it’s America’s Next Top Model and whatever wacky shit Tyra does next. Mine is that bottom-of-the-barrel breeding ground for washed up/never was 
Ahh, the summer college internship. I worked one summer at the local arts council learning how to write grants. You come in for a month or two, get some practical experience, wear clothes that make you feel like you’re playing dress-up with your mom’s outfits, get a recommendation letter, and go back to your life. Right?
Move over, Sean Avery, alt-rocker