Celebrity Life Swap Is A Bad Idea

CBS, the network behind I Get That A Lot — in which celebs do “ordinary” jobs — will soon air The Same Name, a show in which a celeb switches lives with a normal person with the same name.

Okay, so, a “normal” person — a receptionist, let’s say — named Jennifer Lopez (for instance) gets to have her hair, nails and makeup done, wear fancy clothes, eat at an amazing restaurant, maybe pose in a photo shoot and sleep on Frette sheets in a luxury hotel room or even a Beverly Hills mansion. The celebrity Jennifer Lopez, meanwhile, is hilariously “getting a kick out of” answering phones and signing for FedEx packages, all the while folks in the office are like OMG it’s HER! Then at the end, the receptionist has to go back to her Old Navy wardrobe and $25k salary, while J.Lo says something like “Answering phones was fun!” And the receptionist thinks, no, it is not fucking fun, it is a low-paying, high-stress nightmare, and sometimes I dream that the phone is ringing or that I have hung up on a very important person I meant to put on hold and lost the company millions of dollars. And as long and as hard as I work, I will never afford to have ONE PAIR of Louboutins, and you have a CLOSET FULL but oh yeah, I got to be on TV, and now people will interrupt me at work, not only to ask me if I am the “real” Jennifer Lopez but if I was the one on that show. Previously, when people joked about me being you, it didn’t really hurt, because I didn’t know what it was like. But now, having gotten a taste of the pampering and wealth, I’ll be haunted day in and day out by the ache of what I don’t have, and be reminded day and night because we have the same damn name. Awesome.