Just a couple of weeks ago, in response to this post about the booze, hookup, and daddy’s AmEx-driven culture of Washington interns, I commented that my Hill internship sure didn’t seem to resemble that; neither did my subsequent summer residential fellowship. (I was out at IHS. Our semi-sister program, the Koch Fellowship, was rumored to offer quite the party scene. We, like good grad student geeks, played Diplomacy on Saturday nights. And we liked it.)
(By now most of the know where I’m going with this, right?)
Since then, we’ve learned something new about the life of the twenty-something Hill Rat. (Do they still say Hill Rat, or am I dating myself?) If the Washingtonienne story about the staff assistant blogging about her sex-for-“gifts”-life and subsequently getting fired for it provides some sort of moral Rorshach test, I’ve probably failed. I’ve found it really funny more of ten than I’ve found it appalling.
But I can’t help noticing: the scandal in my Hill internship program came when one of the interns got fired for using the Congressional frank for personal mail. He got busted because he wrote the letter on an office word processor and left it saved to the hard drive, and it said, roughly, “Dude, this is so cool; I’m sending you this letter for free ’cause I’ll get it franked, just like I do all my mail.” Now this has a faint resemblance to the Washingtonienne story; like Washingtonienne, the formal charge was misuse of office stuff for personal reasons, and the charge was confirmed by an electronic record.
On the other hand, not. There is actually no resemblance. And I can’t help thinking, again, that other Washington twenty-somethings seem to lead much more interesting lives than I even ever heard about.
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