My “No Task Too Small” Attitude

Have you heard about that girl? She braided her way into Hollywood.

By the time I found myself interviewing at a temp agency in West Hollywood, I had four internships on my resume. I’d picked up an executive’s high-heels from a cobbler in Beverly Hills. I’d walked her dog during lunch, then stealthily hid him in a purse and snuck him back into the office building where he wasn’t allowed. I’d wrapped birthday presents for an exec’s daughter’s friend’s party. I’d called restaurants in Italy to rejigger reservations for someone’s honeymoon. I’d raced down to the parking garage to place a water bottle in the cupholder of an SUV, moments before the President arrived, hands empty, presumably parched. When you get to a certain level in Hollywood, you don’t have to carry your own water bottle or pay for your lunch or learn anyone’s name. I can’t say I did this for the money, because mostly I did it for free.

Back then and still, my generation is criticized for being too entitled and expecting too much. Sometimes I think I expected too little. Even so, the shift from being a Stanford student to being an intern and aspiring assistant was jarring. In college, people cared about what we thought. In Hollywood, they cared that we double-checked their lunch orders, could lift 20-40 pounds without suing, and did errands quickly and without incident. But in my fourth internship, which I’d started right after graduating a few months before, I was miraculously paid, and sometimes fed, too. I got to go to set, and table reads, and casting sessions. I felt lucky, and I was.

I was at the temp agency that morning because my internship was running out, and I needed to get another foot in another door. I’d read on Yelp that the woman I was interviewing with, let’s call her Paula, was brusque and blunt and had poor manners. So I was unprepared when Paula called me in from the lobby and started showering me with compliments. She was in her sixties and had a New York accent and wavy gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. She loved that I was from Northern California; she could tell I was kinder, classier, and smarter than “girls from around here.” “Thank you,” I said, wondering what Southern Californians had done to her.

Paula knew she could place me at a company, my resume was great, everything would be fine! She loved my outfit, by the way, and also my hair. I wore it down, past my shoulders, and it was normally blond but had recently turned greenish from the copper and chlorine in the pipes at my new apartment. Conveniently, my new boyfriend was colorblind and hadn’t noticed. Neither did Paula.

“Thank you,” I said again.

She asked if I knew how to braid. 

“Yes,” I said.

“French braid?”

I nodded, and she whooped. Her hair was driving her crazy. She told me what we were going to do. First, I’d take a typing test on a 20-year-old desktop computer. Then we’d go to the bathroom together, and I’d braid her hair.

At a sleepover in high school, a better place to braid

I laughed and hoped she was joking. I typed fast and hoped she’d forget. When I’d finished, she said I could call into the agency when my internship ended, and she’d start placing me at companies. I thanked her and walked to the door. 

“Wait for me,” she said. She led me down the hall to a bathroom with many stalls. Anyone could’ve come in and seen what we did next. She let down her ponytail and handed me the hair elastic. “One big braid,” she instructed. She wanted a French braid, but I explained I can only French braid my own hair. I learned how by practicing while I watched TV as a kid, over and over until my hands cramped up. 

“Sorry,” I told her, and quickly did a regular braid. She looked in the mirror and seemed pleased and grateful. “I’m glad you like it,” I told her. I left, and I had a parking ticket and a weird feeling about the agency, and about Paula, and the career path I’d chosen that brought me to that bathroom, where luckily no one walked in to see a young hopeful braiding her interviewer’s hair.

I wondered if I could have said no, or if it was actually good I didn’t say no. She just asked me for a favor, and really, what’s a little hair-braiding between interviewer and interviewee? Maybe it had been a test of my “no task too small” attitude; I passed. Or a test of my self-respecting boundaries; I failed. I wondered why she looked at me and thought I should braid her hair. My hair wasn’t even in a braid.

Back at my internship, I told my supervisor what I’d done. We laughed. Then she said, “You’re not going back there.” She extended my internship, and I never called Paula. When I visited Northern California, my sister helped me get the green out of my hair with half a bottle of ketchup. A few months later, my hair turned green again. I bought a shower head that filtered the water, and I washed my hair with ketchup a few more times. I was relieved I didn’t have to move or dye my hair, and I could finally tell my boyfriend about the colors he hadn’t seen.

Receipts from my sister’s phone, the first time my hair turned green

Within a few months, I got a job as an assistant, as hoped. My new boss never asked me anything personal, except once: “Did you watch Glee last night?” I had not. One of my main responsibilities was to pull him out of meetings after 20 minutes and make up a good excuse for him to leave. Once, he asked if I thought the company should order a TV project. I said yes and gave an argument for why people would watch it. That afternoon, I heard him on the phone using my argument with his boss, word for word. They ordered it! When I told my friends about my secret success, my measurable influence, they asked if he gave me credit. “Why would he give me credit?” I asked. 

Sometimes he called me into his office and asked me to shut the door. “I need to ask you a question.” Then he asked me to smell his breath and examine his tongue for white spots. No matter my answer, he always responded, “I’m gonna go brush my teeth,” and walked off to the bathroom. I wondered why he didn’t just do that first, but no task was too small for me. I never touched his hair. It was too short to braid.