It started as just another letter in the pile that Elle magazine advice columnist E. Jean gets every week. Like a lot of us lately, the letter-writer was coping with unemployment and asked E. Jean for help:
I’m currently homeless and living in a Wal-Mart parking lot. I’m educated, I have never done drugs, and I am not mentally ill. I have a strong employment history and am a career executive assistant. The instability sucks, but I’m rocking it as best as I can.
The rest of the letter recounted the story of the homeless young woman applying for a job and bombing the interview. Here’s what E. Jean had to say, after two paragraphs of useful and inspirational job search advice:
This is what you did with your letter: You knocked me out with your courage and spirit. I am therefore, Miss Not Hopeless, offering you a four-month internship. Of course it’s the most hideously humdrum internship in America. You’ll be stuck with the tedious job of organizing research for my book, transcribing interviews, and analyzing data from 1,800,000 pages (not a misprint) of a college sex survey I did on Facebook. I looked you up and discovered you’re on the West Coast and that you write a highly entertaining blog. You possess a brain andaccess to a computer. Excellent! If you accept this internship, you’ll telecommute to my East Coast mountain office one hour a day, six days a week. At the end of the four months, if you don’t have a job and an awesome place to live, I will become your intern.
Three cheers for E. Jean. Methinks Dear Abby could take some lessons from her.
