Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You wake up at 5 a.m. to go to get a taxi for the airport. As you leave your dorm, you notice high school campers stumble back from a night spent clubbing. Later, you arrive at the airport and have your only good suit scanned several times by security people. It seems they too cannot believe you are wearing a suit today. You fall asleep on the airplane while listening to your iPod. You realize that the Aerosmith song “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” is stuck in your head. You consider getting back together with your ex- girlfriend.

10 a.m: Arrive in LA. Check voice mail. Listen to a voice message that informs you your job interview has been canceled. Become the only cursing yuppie who throws in “Damn the Man!” between epithets.

Then, you call the high-powered production company who was supposed to be interviewing you. You tell them that they have to see you today, cause you have flown down from Stanford just to see them. You surprise yourself that you seem vaguely threatening, an adjective only used to describe you if people don’t return your Muppet DVDs. Apparently, not many people threaten high-powered production companies, and they tell you if you hurry they can fit you in. You’re not sure if you’ve just proven you have big brass ones or this is a trap. Though you wonder if production companies bouncers all have ponytails and goatees too, you brave the interview.

You get a taxi and use all but six dollars to get to a faceless building in a neighborhood you cannot afford. Marble floors and three secretaries with headsets greet you. Headsets remind you of mission control for NASA and then that crappy “I Don’t Want To Miss A thing” song from that space movie is back in your head. You imagine Billy Bob Thornton on all of their faces and you vomit a little in your mouth. You decide now that breathing on your interviewer would be a bad idea. You wait in the hollow, cold marble hallway for eternity. You realize that you cannot live without that ex-girlfriend.

Eventually you get your hand shaken by a man dressed less-well than you, and judging by his gelled and carefully disheveled hair, he’s either here to interview you or he’s late for his Pert Plus commercial. It’s the former, and you wonder if his suspicious gaze is due to your superior dress or your lack of hair care products. In this primitive land, your scent reeks of outsider. Now he will take you to his chieftain, and you will prove your worth by beating your proverbial chest and telling him how much you like data entry.

His office is gray, but not cement gray, which means someone actually decided to paint it like this. He has no degrees on the wall, meaning he’s a temp. He lectures you for 45 minutes on what he does for a job and what you would do. You keep saying “ok,” and “sounds good,” and even a “yup” to seem down to earth. You realize that the interview process basically consists of being lectured until your attrition wears down and the surviving candidates are hired. In this way, it’s like FEMA. You check the wall clock and you haven’t answered a question yet. I don’t want to miss a thing. Dammit.

Finally, you’re asked how you see yourself in this company. While you initially want to say “leading armies into battle and crushing competitors underneath my mighty battle axe” you fall back on your experience in customer service, PR work and training sea lions to recycle orphans. He is passive. He asks you about your grades; you tell him.

He thanks you for your time. Knowing that you blew the last of your money on this interview/lecture where you answered two questions, you figure you should at least get your money’s worth out of him. You ask him what else your resume could use for something like this. He says it’s perfect, and you know that means you’re so not getting this job. Even if he did actually think that, his higher ups aren’t going to respect someone whose opinion of someone is “oh, they’re perfect.” You’re not a Flemish painting, you are a potential employee. Now thoroughly depressed, you wonder if your ex will take you back, or your flirtations with L.A. will permanently doom us. L.A. means nothing to me, baby.

You head back to the airport using the L.A. bus system. This is in itself an accomplishment because the search for LA’s mass transit system is the subject of the next Indiana Jones movie. You begin to peel off parts of your fine yuppie attire, revealing the obscure band t-shirt inside. You sit between a man with a rare coughing disorder that lets him think it’s appropriate to cough on you and a woman with two lazy eyes. You give them names in your head, such as “Coughy” and “Cookie Monster.” Cookie Monster gets off after a couple stops but Coughy will transform himself into a mother of three and sit next to you on the flight home, her children clawing at the remains of your suit.

You arrive at the airport and you call your friends, who reassure you that you’re infinitely employable, and that this is only the beginning of the job search. On the flight home, you contemplate ways of killing Aerosmith.