Being a Page sounds hard :(

[MrAngryFace]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/nyregion/14page.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

It is not glamorous work — $10 an hour to photocopy, fetch coffee and often stand sentry outside studio doors in empty hallways. A publicity pamphlet advises that potential pages should expect to work “at least six days” a week.

And thus has Ms. Saechao, the daughter of Laotian refugees who settled in Portland, Ore., traced the early career path of Regis Philbin, Ted Koppel, Michael Eisner, Kate Jackson, Eva Marie Saint and countless other notables who started out as pages at NBC. Which may help explain why 7,000 people apply for 60 to 85 slots each year, making the page program about 10 times as competitive as admission to Harvard or Yale.

“It was a wonderful time,” said Mr. Koppel, who worked as a page in 1960 and went on to spend 25 years anchoring “Nightline” on ABC. “I dated my way through the Radio City Rockettes.”

So far, Ms. Saechao is having a tamer experience, working in the sports and Olympics marketing departments and as a production coordinator on the “Today” show since she started the yearlong program in March. One recent morning, she led a tour through NBC Studios — a core page duty — instructing 30 visitors to file into a small cinema for a 10-minute film on the network’s history.

“Hope you guys are ready to get wet,” Ms. Saechao called out, then added, “Just kidding!”

It is a particularly auspicious time to be a page, thanks to Tina Fey’s hit comedy “30 Rock,” on which Jack McBrayer plays Kenneth Parcell, a page with a heart of gold and a head full of helium. At 35, Mr. McBrayer is rather long in the tooth for the page program, which is usually peopled by recent college graduates. Mr. McBrayer was not a page himself. But he has been mistaken for one.

“It happens mostly when people are delivering stuff, and there I am at a desk in my page uniform,” he said in a telephone interview. “Instead of giving the whole spiel, that I’m an actor in a fake show, I just look down at the phone list and type ‘2379, Marci Klein.’ ”

As endearing as Mr. McBrayer’s character is, the generally clueless Kenneth might not have made the cut in real life. Karissa Hoffman, manager of the page program, said she plowed through scores of applications every week. The basic requirements are a bachelor’s degree relevant to broadcasting, a grade-point average of least 3.0 and at least one internship in a related field. Ms. Saechao said the pages also shared one crucial characteristic: “We’re all hams.”