DIARY OF A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT
He Asked Me to Help His Son See Into The Dead Zone
Don’t have a crystal ball? Try the next best thing: a spreadsheet.
My college education was 100% funded by student loans I paid off over twenty years ago. Coming across an old loan application, I realized how little I understood what I was doing when I signed up for these loans.
Going through a box of old letters and photos my mother saved and then given to me, I discovered a decades-old student loan application. It was smushed in among college-year photos of people I hadn’t seen since my twenties and letters from high school friends sent before email took over. On carbon paper, from the days when you didn’t fill out applications online, this crumpled relic took me back to my first year of college.
In my mind’s eye, I saw an 18-year-old me walking 10 blocks from my dorm to the nearest branch of this bank to open my first checking account. A bank that had been bought and renamed at least three times since this form was printed.
Around the time I rediscovered this form, I received a request from one of my clients.
The Dead Zone.
I’d been a VA for a few months—that’s Virtual Assistant for the uninitiated—when…
