Okay, so here I was talking to my friend Erin online about my craigslist ad, and how interesting the replies are and stuff, and whether or not i should follow up with any of them, and in what way. And I log out of my hotmail account, and it sends me back to the MSN home page, and on the msn home page, you’ll never guess what I see:

It’s a weird little graphic of a woman talking desperately on the phone, overlaid with another woman with a headset, and some kind of cards laid in front of her on the table, and the words “I was a phony psychic” over it all. Needless to say, I clicked on it, and it turned out to be an article by a columnist named Emily Yoffe, who writes a column (human guinea pig on slate) where she supposed to explore interesting areas of life or something like that.

So it turns out that she became a phone psychic line operator so that she could write about it! And then all these people call her asking for relationship advice, and she fumbles around with some tarot cards, and then just ends up letting these people listen and talk about their situation, and she just helps them accept the answer thats already in front of their face. Then it turns out that the company she was working for, screwed her out of getting paid in the end. Anyway, its a really good article actually, and has a lot of good things to say, I think, about psychics, and why people go to them. It has a nice closing too. It basically says that even if she was faking it, its okay as long as she was helping people out.

Plus its just fucking weird that it came onto MSN during the conversation i was having about how far to take my fake job ad, and how far is too far for the sake of my research. And is there some way to help people with this ad? Maybe. Maybe the idea of involving them in the story of this supposed occult investigation agency is enough. I know it would be for me, and I would tell all my friends about how I was applying to work at the real life ghostbusters.