• Join The Fed
• Advertise with The Fed

• About Us
• Contact

In This Issue

• What To Do With Books
• Craigslist Finds New Ways to Disturb
• Ovary Mining: Profit In Your Pants
• Letters to the Feditors
• Experience? Uh, no
• Sitting On Babies?
• The Internet = Porn. Porn = The Fed. Logically...
• "Which Came First, the Chicken or the Dregs?"
• Hey, Athletes! Need a Team? Call Me Ishmael.
• Hot Sex? Meh. Mock Interviews? Ooo Yeah, Baby.
• Swipe, Suffer, Suffocate
• From The Desk of Lee "El Cuisinart" Bollinger
• Practice Protectionism in the Bedroom
• Living at the Speed of 2.99x10^8 m/s
• Sensitivity Training Averts Termination
• Congrats, You're Fucked
• The Hierarchy of Columbia
• THEY Watch

Mike Bredin

From solid to liquid in six hours of quality programming.

So summer rolled around after my sophomore year and I found myself at home, disgruntled and with little incentive to change out of this old pair of pajamas covered in spatulas. For the first time in two years my dysfunctional family was reunited under one roof. In retrospect, I’m surprised my mom didn’t re-enroll herself, my father, my sister and me in family therapy that summer. In any case, I needed a job, not only to buy my way to the movies and into the liquor shop owner’s heart, but also to guarantee time when my mom couldn’t talk to me.

    My job prospects were as limited as my ambition to get employment. Spending the first three weeks of summer going only from my spatula pajamas to the beach and then back into my spatula pajamas left me a little over two months to work. And hence, you meet my dilemma. What respectable business would hire some bum in spatula pajamas for two months?

    Luckily I have this friend named Craig. And my friend Craig has a special list.  That’s right. After realizing that my only option for employment was begging a former boss to let me spend the summer making and, knowing my supreme talents, inevitably spilling coffee on myself, I turned to an employer that judges only by the tone of your emails. An added perk is that I write my best when donning spatula pajamas.  

    Craigslist.org is your friend too, when it comes to just about anything. Whether  in the market for a free couch with a subtle urine smell, or “Looking for a swinging partner$$$$$cock”, Craigslist rarely lets its users down.  And when it comes to employment opportunities, Craigslist.org is no less amazing.

    My first two Craigslist jobs that summer were lucrative and fun. The first was a catering job I did with a friend at some fancy-dandy ranch.  Despite ending our nine-hour shift drunk and on stage with the band singing “Lets Get it On” my friend and I were paid in full, at $20/hr, plus tip. The second job was to help this man unpack his moving boxes. When another guy hired in addition to myself was let go after turning out upon arrival to have the common sense of a slow four year old, I was able to work twice as many hours as originally planned.

    My third Craigslist job that summer will stay in my heart and in the part of my brain that tells me not to get fat, forever. The job description was easy enough: “Do you know how to type?” (Do I know how to type? I asked myself. Pssht, Yeah I know how to type, like Lindsay Lohan knows how to drive. Oh wait.) “Then come help out Mary Ann with data entry at $11/hr.” Called up Mary Ann, was hired, obviously, and went over to her place the next day.

    I had trouble finding her place at first. Not many houses in Los Angeles are buried in ivy under the 405 freeway, but Mary Ann was special from the start. I thought it unusual that the door was left wide open, but it was a sunny day and I assumed a very welcoming gesture to her latest Craigslist bitch. I walked in to what turned out to be a very small studio and was immediately struck by the large inflated blob splayed out all over the bed. At first I thought Mary Ann had made a gigantic bloated pancake and dressed it in a blue flower mumu. In reality, Mary Ann had made herself into a gigantic bloated pancake and put on a mumu.

    She was very polite and pointed to the computer across the room where I would be doing her data entry. I looked at myself in a mirror on the wall to make sure I wasn’t a retarded Leonardo Dicrapio in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”, and then proceeded to sit down at the desk. I contemplated leaving for fear that if I didn’t my true purpose there as Mary Ann’s lunch would be realized.  

    Mary Ann’s job was to send out resumes to different businesses on behalf of unemployed professionals. The job made sense because it allowed her to be bed ridden as long as she had a headset and someone to type for her. My job was to type what Mary Ann dictated to me because, in short, she couldn’t move her fat ass from her sagging mattress.

    You know what? That was really mean. I apologize because in the three hours I was there typing, Mary Ann did in fact get up once. The bed was behind me, so all I could hear was her getting up, opening and shutting a cabinet, then lying back down again. I looked behind me to ask her a question as she was already starting to inhale the second of two Nestle bars she had evidently just gotten from the kitchen. Oh obese Mary Ann, I wondered, please don’t die of a heart attack while I’m here.

    The three hours ended and I left Mary Ann there under the freeway. She called me a couple of times in the following weeks but by then, I was babysitting, and had little need to trek outside my secluded beach town to do data entry. I actually did end up making and spilling coffee that summer. I’ve never hated myself more. Craigslist adventures are fun, but since Mary Ann, I’ve kept strictly to Craigslist Sales and the occasional, ahem, Personals venture.  It’s not that I feel uncomfortable around people 16 times my size.  It’s just that I’ve learned “Craigslist” as an answer to “What’s your past employment experience?” doesn’t quite cut it in the real world.