GazillionBazillions (www.gazbaz.moc), the leading financial, political, and scientific blog site, is in search of two talented editorial interns for the summer.

Responsibilities:

• Provide administrative support for the department/division such as answering telephones, selling advertising, and filling in when the most experienced staff fail to show up.
• Bring order to our filing “bucket,” a large bin where we’ve been throwing important documents since our company’s inception.
• Provide helpdesk solutions for our overpaid, under-educated staff
• Make executive-level decisions about the direction of the company. Must be willing to accept responsibility to shareholders for said decisions.
• Repair drywall/Remove water stains
• Throw rose petals (self supplied) in the wake of our CEO, while never treading on his shadow

Requirements:

• A steady hand
• Must currently be a student
• College degree required (Masters or PH.D. preferred)
• 18 1/2 years of professional writing, editing, and tap-dancing experience at a major newspaper or magazine
• Must have flexible morality/be willing to break the law
• Intimate knowledge of quantum mechanics and/or molecular biology
• Proficiency with Mac, Windows, Unix, Linux, ENIAC, and Kremvax
• Must be available to work no fewer than 60 hours/week
• Ability to levitate a big plus.

Candidates fluent in Mandarin & Cantonese will be considered first.

Please send us a short paragraph about why you want this internship as well as a proposed solution to the Hodge Conjecture (no longer than 140 characters, plz) to the e-mail above.

* Compensation: Unpaid (Meal stipend possible)
* This is an internship “job”
* Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
* Please, no phone calls about this job!
* Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

I ran to it like a man dying of thirst. Here, finally, was a chance to peer into the mind of the Kinkos target demographic. The books on the narrow rack fell into three categories: get rich quick, self-help books, and how-to’s on dealing with irrational coworkers. My eyes first fell on “The Insider’s Guide to Making Money in Real Estate; an ill-timed edition to be sure. Next to that was a lone copy of Working with You Is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself from Emotional Traps at Work, a guide to surviving crazy bosses. Hidden around the back was the dangerously optimistic Developing the Leader Within You. The rest were all about improving yourself and the emotional and/or financial state common to the soul-crushing life.

What struck me most about the books was that they just seemed to be randomly placed there; as if this little oasis of self-help in the sterile gray speckle carpeted desert of productivity had come about organically. There weren’t more than two copies of any book and most of them were well-worn. It was as if some psychological victim of the corporate life had sneaked in here and surreptitiously installed a book swap center, a little ray of sunshine in the crippling monotony of the dull-fluorescent, dry walled life. But who could get in here unless he had a key?

I was absorbed in the image of the stealthy, stifled corporate revolutionary when the Fedex-Kinkos worker at the counter snapped me out of my reverie. My pictures, required for my application to graduate school in Cairo, were ready.

“Here you go,” he said, handing them to me in the glossy faux-passport.

“But I still need to pay,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, and walked away.