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The Media Mole Rodeo is quickly winding down, and with every passing hour your chances of having a debaucherous evening in the company of all four Gawker editors and Page Six's sultry Paula Froelich grow ever dimmer. So send in your juicy anecdotes to mole@gawker.com, stat!

This afternoon's entry shines an uncomfortable light on that exclusive bastion of uppitiness, the New Yorker. So what if it's the advertising department? We'd wager that working for Malcolm Gladwell is just as crazy. The sordid tale after the jump.

A few years ago, I worked as the assistant to two sales reps at the New Yorker. It was my first real job out of college, and I was so awestruck at being hired at such an august institution that I ignored some important warning signs—such as, they gave me less than 24 hours to make my decision, and they wanted me to start in, like, two days. Also, they were very circumspect about why the last person had left (I later found out she'd walked off the job in tears). But I ignored everything sketchy and signed up.

At first my bosses were really nice—almost suspiciously so. But they slowly started getting more and more psychotic. They'd yell at me for putting a sheet in the media kit in the wrong order, then tell me how great I was and take me out to get $75 pedicures. One of my bosses was also going through some weird family stuff—I got the feeling that her dad was batshit crazy—and I had to listen to her negotiating really personal stuff on the phone all the time. Also, I had to do all their expenses, and most of their "client lunches" and "spa treatments" were actually with their friends. They'd throw their crumpled cab receipts at me and tell me to just make up where they'd gone. All that was almost tolerable, but the breaking point was when one of them asked me to get tickets for an Elton John concert she wanted to take "clients" to. Well, she wouldn't let me use a ticket broker, and the best seats I could get—right after the tickets went on sale—weren't up to her standards. She started yelling at me (in the open office) that the tickets were unacceptable, then got the other woman to yell at me, too. I started crying and resolved then and there to get another job. When I finally gave notice, though, they both completely flipped and started talking shit about me, basically to my face. It just cemented my desire never, ever to work in advertising. Or for the New Yorker, for that matter.

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