Everyone remembers the cool table, or the cool corner in their high school--the place where the Gap clad boys and the lusted-after girls giggled and flirted and ate their julienne-cut carrots. Years later you ask yourself where those cool kids are now, whether they still go to Jaques Louis to get their hair cut, whether they all still drive Cabriolets.

I know the answer: Those people now work at MTV.

And that is the first thing that Soman Chainani, my partner in crime, and I think as we step off that fated train into the area of New York City that should be renamed MTV Central. The titanic offices overlook larger than life posters of a frolicking Nikki Taylor; huge windows glisten in the sun, custom designed so that everyone--and I do mean everyone --can look into the haven of coolness that few--and I do mean very few--may enter. The extent of this exclusivity we soon find out.

We swagger into the main office, and see a security guard standing front and center in front of a huge escalator. We look cool, we look official, unlike the hundreds of people ogling the plush offices in the cold.

"Excuse me, sir, we're here from the Harvard Crimson. We have a meeting with..." I try to ask the guard. I smile my cutest smile. I turn up the southern accent. He is not convinced.

"Wait dere. Right in dat corner, " he says in some non-descript accent. "In de corner." This time we're not convinced.

Soman has a camera, I'm holding a tape recorder. We look legit I think. We get past the security guard. We smile. We are cool. Teenage girls standing outside glare.

We swagger up the steps, past the gift shop, past the cheesy caf, and bump right smack dab into another security guard, another non-descript accent.

"Who are you!"He doesn't ask. He exclaims.

I feel confident. Soman looks confident. We are certainly cool enough to be here.

"We have a meeting," I say. "We're on the security list," Soman says.

Security flips through a stack of papers without really looking. "No names are on here." We try again, naming a MTV contact that we're supposed to meet. "Megan Henry," we try. He looks up. The name is recognized. Buzz.

Gigi, the secretary, is sitting behind a desk in a room straight out of the '80s. Big purple plushy couch thing, funky colors, all very modern, very Madonna. Gigi calls our contact, we are sent to the twenty-fifth floor.

We see another security guard and manage to dodge him without having to decode his accent. A row of ten or twelve elevators suddenly makes us feel very small. Kurt Loder steps out of one. We smirk, pretend we're not impressed, step on. Twenty-fifth floor please.

On the 25th floor, we come face to face with a huge poster of the three beautiful ones as we step off the elevator - Cindy (Crawford), Rebecca (Romijn-Stamos), Daisy (Fuentes) - playfully popping the corks off a bottle of champagne. I wonder if Rebecca is that leggy in person. I look at Soman, he looks at me, we both know we've managed to enter an alternate universe. Welcome to their world. And we know there's no going back. We ask the secretary to buzz our contact.