Some journalists work for years before they get their own column. All Ezra Dyer '99 had to do was ask.

A former writer for the Echo, Dyer was painting houses in Maine when he saw an ad in The Boston Globe for a job opening at The Improper Bostonian, an 80,000-circulation free magazine for 20-somethings. "I applied to be features editor or something like that that I had no shot of getting," Dyer said. "But I sent in a bunch of Colby Echo articles and I got a call from the publisher and I went in to see him and he said, 'I didn't want you to come in to talk about the features editor position because, honestly, you're right out of school and you've never even done anything like that.' But he said, 'What would you ideally like to do down the road?' I said, 'Well, I'd like to do what I have been doing, basically what I was doing for the Echo, have a column like that.' He said, 'Okay, I'll give you a column.'"

Done.

Dyer has been a columnist since October 1999, combining that writing job with a staff position at CE Pro, a Wayland, Mass.-based magazine for people who install custom electronics, another of his interests. When he isn't writing about plasma screens and outdoor speakers (he did wangle an interview with Dave Barry on "smart" appliances), Dyer is turning his experiences into prose.

From his perch on Beacon Hill, where he lives with two Colby roommates, Dyer pecks out his bi-weekly column, occasionally injecting literary references ("I'll bet you don't know much about the constructions of femininity in the texts of Edith Wharton and Henry James, now do you?" he asks a gym muscleman featured in one piece. Dyer has fans: more letters run for than against, though a piece told from the point of view of an SUV-driving gas hog drew indignant protests from readers who missed the satire.

Dyer also has written about his new gym ("a miniature nudist colony populated entirely by overweight, middle-aged men"), a tour he took of CIA headquarters ("If it's so unusual for tours to go through here, why do they have a gift shop that hawks all manner of CIA logo schlock?") and the time his car was towed ("By car it's just a short jaunt to the tow lot. On foot, it's a short jaunt through the parking lot of a wholesale fish warehouse, through a train yard. Then you climb over a barbed-wire fence and, voila, you're there.").

The bottom line is that Dyer is making a living writing, though some weeks he barely breaks even. Take the week they hauled his car. "What I paid to get my car back and what I got paid for the column ended up being about the same," Dyer said.

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