She thumbed through the pages of her notebook. She was used to dismissing herself, disregarding the words she’d consigned to these pages as nothing more than scribbles, half-baked musings, the rants of an overworked, stressed-out nobody. But there was a story here, about what it took to be good at this job, whether Ted was serious about her having it or not. Her fingers began to thrum, her blood to course.

Zanne unlocked the filing cabinet and took out her laptop. It was her personal laptop, and she hadn’t had much use for it with all the desktops and company loaners around here, but now she booted it up and loaded the InsideScoop website. It didn’t take long to find the ad for her job. She laid her notebook on the desk beside her and started to type. She was breathless with relief, the kind she’d felt every time she’d made amends to an old friend. She lifted and moved one block of text to the top, another toward the bottom. Twenty minutes later, she was done. And as surely as she’d known eighteen years ago that she had to throw that phone away and get the fuck out of LA, come what may, she knew there was no choice now but to click publish.

Confessions of a Personal Assistant

Anonymous

We all know why we’re here—for the money. Anyone who tells themselves there’s a career in this is crazier than you already have to be to work here. We’re all doing the math from the time we get the call to interview for this thing that is apparently an actual job and not a prank in the classifieds. We learned about it one night from a friend of a friend of a friend and, in spite of the drinks and whispers or maybe because of them, we’d felt as if we were being recruited for the CIA. The salary range we heard about? It’s real. Six figures to help an executive and his family with personal tasks. What does that mean, we wonder: managing a calendar, picking up the dry cleaning, walking the dog? For six figures, we’ll do anything. Six figures is real money, more than we’ve come close to earning in our chosen fields as academics, musicians, yoga instructors, poets, depressives. For years we’ve been getting nowhere, eating tuna sandwiches and ramen while we try to get out of the hole. There are so many people with a claim on us—from Fannie Mae to the IRS to Chase Bank. Six figures is life changing.

In the interview, we sit across a desk from someone who looks just like us only financially stable—wearing a nice sweater, resting in their body with the peace that comes from having had a flu shot and their teeth cleaned—and we start to sense other, nonmaterial inducements.

“This job can be challenging,” they warn us.