Read Online Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling - Free Book Online Page B

friendly, uniformed butlers. I wasn’t sure it was really my style, but it seemed like the first rung on the ladder to somehow working in TV. Young television writers all aspire to be TBN pages, in the hope that a late-night talk show host like Craig Ferguson or David Letterman will eventually overhear them uttering something witty while leading a tour, and then say, “You’re brilliant! Why don’t you come work for me and be my best friend?” They hire only seventy or eighty pages a year, out of something like forty-two million applicants. I decided the odds were stacked against me, which strangely made me feel like I was going to get the job even more. Sports movies had brainwashed me into the belief that when the chips are down the most, that is when success is the most inevitable.
    I’m the kind of person who would rather get my hopes up really high and watch them get dashed to pieces than wisely keep my expectations at bay and hope they are exceeded. This quality has made me a needy and theatrical friend, but has given me a spectacularly dramatic emotional life.
    Anyway, I got called in for an interview with the program. I wore a pin-striped skirt suit I ordered from the clothing section of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. You know that section, where they can make a woman modeling a pair of overalls look slutty? Yeah, it’s amazing.
    I thought I looked pretty awesome—like one of Ally McBeal’s friends in cheaper material.
    I arrived fifteen minutes early for my interview, which was the first of my three mistakes. I was interviewed by a paunchy and balding man name Leon. He was one of the guys who managed the page program, and it was obvious that lunchtime was his thirty-minute respite from this hell job of interviewing an assembly line of ambitious, obnoxious liberal arts school grads. He didn’t have an assistant to tell me to wait outside. There was no “outside” to his tiny office. Or a waiting area, as I thought there would be. It wasn’t a posh enough job to have earned him all these extra rooms. My early arrival meant that either he would have to interview me or I would have to wander around Midtown for a while. Unfortunately, he chose the former. He reluctantly shoved his Quiznos sub aside and told me to have a seat. Strike one.
    Life had been hard on Leon, his portliness and baldness obscuring his relative youth. Looking at a photo on his desk of him with two little kids, I asked, “Oh, are those your kids? They’re so cute.”
    He looked aghast. “I’m twenty-five. Those are my nephews. You think I have kids?”
    I was unable to conceal my surprise. “Oh! It’s just that, you don’t look, um, you seem more mature than that.”
    Leon gestured to me. “We’re basically the same age.”
    Without thinking, I immediately responded, “Well, I’m actually three years younger than you.” Why on earth did I correct him on his point? Oh, because I was a snotty little idiot.
    Strike two.
    Leon asked me, while eyeing his Quiznos sandwich longingly, why I wanted to be a TBN page. I answered honestly, saying that I would be honored to work for a terrific company that had been host to all my favorite shows growing up, and that the opportunities that came from the page program seemed amazing.
    “Hold on.” Leon stopped me. “So you only want this job for the opportunities it affords? ”
    I was puzzled. “I mean, that’s part of why I’m applying, yes.”
    “This job is more than just a stepping-stone.” Leon jotted down a short word on my résumé that could only have been hate or yuck. Strike three.
    Leon was now openly disgusted. What had he wanted? For me to say that all I wanted to do into my twilight years was give people backstage tours of morning talk shows? Oh, yeah. Yes. That’s exactly what he wanted me say. I left knowing with certainty that I had not gotten the job. It was hard to be devastated, because it had been such a top-to-bottom disaster.
    Now when I watch my friend Jack