Alexandria Symonds, Columbia ’10, is the current editor of The Eye, the weekly arts magazine published by the school’s Spectator Publishing Company, but before taking up her current editorial mantle, she was stuck combing the dredges of the Internet for lucrative internship opportunities – much like any other college student.

In the latest issue of The Eye, Alex shares with her readers – and by proxy, the entirety of the blogosphere – the harrowing tale of an interview for an unnamed book publicity firm that ended with a bizarre twist.

Apparently, the interview went well, and Alex was given an extensive tour of the facility, which typically precedes the congratulatory ‘You’re Hired’ speech. Everything in the office appeared relatively harmless – until her tour guide, the company’s vice president, uttered the words: “And this is where the interns sit.”

She explains:

Smiling, I followed his gaze to a cluster of cubicles where four girls smiled back at me. Their smiles looked a lot like mine, in fact, and it only took me a split second to realize that it was because their faces looked a lot like mine—and so did their eyes, their hair, their clothes. Brian, it seemed, had a type. This guy collected me.

 

Maybe this wasn’t as big a deal as I was making it, but really, the resemblance was uncanny—it was like looking in a funhouse mirror. I couldn’t shake the mental image of my head lined up with all these girls’ heads on a shelf in a basement somewhere. So I mumbled something about how glad I was to have met him, and dashed off an e-mail later that night saying something about scheduling conflicts. Sometimes, the extra three lines on your resumé just aren’t worth it.

Sadly, due to obvious legal reasons, Alex stops short of identifying the alleged "woman collector," but thankfully, three key details slipped through the cracks:

1. As Alex is from New York (thank you, Facebook, for this nugget), the potential employer must be in the metropolitan area, which probably means she found the internship on Craigslist.
2. It was a “book publicity firm.”
3. The first name of the vice president of the firm is named “Brian.”

Time to comb Craigslist and Google, ladies and gents!