The Devil Is An Ungrateful Brat Who Should Be So Lucky

So I'm reading The Devil Wears Prada (research for a book I'm ghost-writing; don't ask). And it's clear from the get go that I'm supposed to sympathize with the protagonist, Andrea, an idealistic twenty-three-year-old recent college grad, whose dream of working at the New Yorker seems tragically undermined by her current job as Anna Wintour's assistant. Anna Wintour, as you may or may not know, is the editor of American Vogue and probably the most powerful person in fashion. She is disguised in this roman a clef (go ahead and look it up; I had to) by the name Miranda Priestly. But the disguise is thinner than a sheer silk blouse. Everyone knows this book is about Anna Wintour.Anna Wintour makes crazy demands of Andrea day and night, like asking her to ship a skirt all the way to Paris so Anna can wear it to a party. Shock of shocks, the entire fashion community is summoned to contribute skirts and Andrea and another assistant choose a selection from hundreds of donations from the likes of Prada, Chanel, Donna Karan--you name it. We're supposed to be stunned that Anna Wintour, the most powerful woman in fashion, actually has the pull to elicit such feverish activity from the fashion community.Anyway, long story short, Andrea works day and night taking care of annoying details great and small so that Anna Wintour never has to worry about mundane things like dry-cleaning and picking up her cat from the vet. We're supposed to be filled with venom for Anna Wintour. It's only fashion, after all. Who does she think she is expecting someone else to order her lunch? And here's the best part. While Andrea, who narrates the story first person, never tires of denigrating fashion as an ignoble and trite profession, her flesh and blood counter-part, author and New Yorker wannabe Lauren Weisberger, is making truckloads of cash by penning the most ignoble form of drivel imaginable--the tell-all!And she doesn't do it very well either. Despite her undoubtedly hyperbolic complaints, I don't hate Anna Wintour. I hate Andrea. She's twenty-three and while, yes, she does indeed have a bachelor's degree in English, let's face it, if she were qualified to do more than order Anna Wintour's lunch, she'd be doing it.When I was twenty-three, you know what I was doing? I was guarding an empty equipment truck on a movie set in the freezing cold in Hell's Kitchen. Well, that or typing mind-numbingly boring memos at one of my hundreds of soul-destroying temp. jobs. Or, no, here's a good one, removing rusty nails and other potentially dangerous objects from a trash-strewn back alley in order to protect the precious feet of some unknown actors who were about to shoot a scene there.That's the kind of crap you do when you're twenty-three.So anyway, I thought it would be fun if you, my dear readers, contributed some of your humiliating job stories so that the Lauren Weisbergers of the world could learn that, as it turns out, one does not ascend from the university to the New Yorker without slugging it out with the rest of the working stiffs in mail rooms, junk yards, cubicles, greasy spoons, factories, and lord knows where else.Tell her, people. Tell it like it is.