Once upon a time there was a young princess named Jennifer (hereafter referred to as “our princessâ€). Long long ago, when our princess was a wee high school senior, she interned with the Boise Weekly for a semester. Although her American Government teacher believed that she was prowling the legislature looking for breaking news, she really spent most of her time hanging around the BW office helping out with the top10 music lists and developing a taste for journalism.
After high school, our princess went on to Stanford University, where, during a brief stint as a computer science major, she increased her typing speed to 70 WPM and became familiar with both PC and Mac platforms as well as a wide variety of word processing, spreadsheet and database software.
Upon graduating, our princess went to work for a dot.com during the tech boom in Silicon Valley. The money was good, but our princess just wasn’t happy. Why not? She discovered that she preferred working with non-profit organizations over money-grubbing Big Business-types. Her search for co-workers who loved their jobs, not their paychecks, led her to the American Conservatory Theatre, where she became the assistant to the Producing Director. This job helped her refine her skills as a receptionist: doing battle over the phone with difficult agents, sorting mail, running interference for her boss when he didn’t want to take a call, and filing headshots until her eyes bled.
For the past few years, our princess has worked as a stage manager in a variety of theatrical contexts, from outdoor festivals to touring educational companies. This has made her adaptable, responsible, and cool under pressure. She’s a meticulous record-keeper and is comfortable managing multiple projects at a time. She responded to the needs of her cast and crew, while remaining unruffled in the presence of the most difficult personalities and challenging situations.
A perfect receptionist, of course has a British accent. Although our princess in is a native Boisean, she spent a year perfecting her faux British accent in the pubs of Oxford. Additional travel abroad in Europe and Asia made her self-reliant, resourceful, and good at sleeping in train stations. Today our princess has just returned to Boise after traveling the eastern United States with an educational theatre company. She’s thrilled to be back in Boise, and, a devoted reader of the Boise Weekly, was thrilled to discover that BW was looking for her: the perfect receptionist.
The End.
The moral of this story is that our princess would be the perfect receptionist for the Boise Weekly: she’s smart, computer literate, loves working with people, and can fake a British accent over the phone.
Sincerely,
JCG
