I've worked at two newspapers in my career. At one of them, there had been a big scandal that reverberated throughout the organization, and so they tried to make some changes to boost morale and create more openness. So they — I can't remember specifically who "they" are — appointed a well-respected, popular editor to a masthead position in which his entire job was to talk with employees about their goals and how to achieve them. Sounds great, right? I had been a "guest editor" at the paper for six months, having transferred from the website. People wanted to keep me around, but I was deemed too junior to hire for a full-time, permanent staff position. And so I was sent to see this man.

He asked me if I wanted to keep working there, and I said, yes, very much. He asked whether I wanted to try to be a copy editor, and I said I didn't really think that was where my skills lay and I had no copyediting experience. He then brought up Lindsay Lohan out of the blue. What did I think of her? Didn't she seem troubled? (This was when she was just starting to be quite troubled.) I said yes, I was worried about her. He asked me whether I thought that her boobs had gotten a lot bigger, seemingly overnight. I said I hadn't really noticed that. (I had noticed! She was going from being a child to being a young woman. And I didn't want to talk with him about that.) He then switched topics abruptly, and talked about a recent long magazine story about teen hookup culture. He said he feared for his kids, and that he didn't think teenagers valued sex anymore. Can you imagine how insane this conversation seemed? He then talked about Lindsay some more, and her boobs, and then I was dismissed, after he said that yes, I needed to take the copyediting test.

My allies who wanted to help me asked me how the meeting went, and I described this disaster. They looked incredulous, so I dropped it. I failed the copyediting test — of course — became a freelance writer (almost exclusively for that newspaper), and then got hired by another paper that didn't think I was too junior to work there. I never saw that editor again, but can only assume he helped no one ever.

—Kate Aurthur