'Georgetown student seeks personal assistant' — It pays to advertise

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In this instance 19-year-old Charley Cooper, a sophomore at Georgetown University who "... has a full load of classes, hours of homework and a part-time job at a financial services company," is gonna make a whole lot more than the person he ultimately takes on to organize his closet et al as a result of the personal ad (above) he placed last week on the school's student employment website.

Jenna Johnson's story on the front page of today's Washington Post Metro section has details.

She wrote, "Cooper would answer questions only through messages sent on his Facebook account, which features a photo [below]

of a man in a striped polo shirt holding a champagne flute."

I must say that I very much enjoyed the last four paragraphs of Johnson's article, which follow.

"Still, springing for a personal assistant is 'definitely out of the ordinary,' said Bonnie Low-Kramen, the longtime personal assistant to actress Olympia Dukakis. Low-Kramen teaches workshops to aspiring celebrity personal assistants and wrote a book titled 'Be the Ultimate Assistant.'"

"'Whenever someone gets wealthy or famous, things can fall through the cracks,' she said. 'There's no chance someone like Scarlett Johansson or Angelina Jolie end up on all of those covers without a team of people.'"

"But college students are rarely mature enough to handle the responsibility of managing a personal assistant, said Low-Kramen, whose son is a senior at the University of Maryland (and does not have a personal assistant)."

"'There's a benefit to learning to do things on your own,' she said. "I know — college is stressful, there's a lot to do. But the pressures are still nowhere near needing a personal assistant.'"

I'm voting for "But college students are rarely mature enough to handle the responsibility of managing a personal assistant" as my favorite quote of the week.

Truly bizarro.

Anyway.

I wish I were smart enough to think up something as clever as Cooper's ad.

Hmmm... maybe I should apply to be his personal assistant; perhaps proximity would result in some of his inventiveness rubbing off on me.

I mean, who doesn't believe that "insanity is contagious – you catch it from your kids" isn't just a clever bumper sticker?

The Georgetown Voice's blog Vox Populi, in a post last Friday, called Cooper's ad "... easily the most absurd job posting ever to be put up on the Student Employment Office website."

Some of the over 160 comments on the Vox Populi post are very amusing.

[via Erika Niedowski writing in the Washington City Paper]