This one goes out to a relative of mine who's getting her first taste of interning in the entertainment business. It's an actual entry from my journal from... a few years ago when I was doing an internship at an Oscar-winning production company.....
As it's a little profane in spots even for this blog, I've replaced a certain offensive word with another. See if you can figure out what it is.
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It’s hard being a Smurfingintern in a Smurfing office where they give you Smurfing menial tasks and treatthem with the same Smurfing weight as the Smurfing tasks that actually Smurfingmatter. Especially when the Smurfingmenial tasks come from the Number 2 person at the Smurfing office and there forcarry more Smurfing weight than the more Smurfing relevant tasks from Smurfingpeople lower on the Smurfing totem pole.
As part of my Smurfing job I’mworking the Smurfing reception desk. This entails answering the Smurfing phone, greeting the guests, helpingout with the Smurfing mail, making Smurfing copies and doing whatever Smurfingtasks the Smurfing assistants ask of me.
The Smurfing problem comes inwhen there is a Smurfing conflict among the Smurfing tasks.
Task 1: An assistant needsseveral pages copied out of a book. No Smurfingproblem, you say? The catch: he doesn’twant the dark crease that appears in the spine when you Xerox from a book andhe doesn’t want the black lines that outline when the pages ended. The pages have to be perfectly white, too…no gray colors that often result from copying.
This means each page must becopied once, to obtain a flat “master.” Then we must use the settings to crop the master as it is Xeroxed andalso lighten the pages. There was afair amount of trial and error involved in this, especially in making sure thatthe initial copies weren’t crooked.
That process took some 30 minutesto work out, and two of us were working on it.
Adding to some confusion was thathe gave us another copying assignment at the same time and told us that heneeded that on 3-hole punched paper. The other intern assumed this meant that both assignments were to be on3-holed paper, so we chose that paper tray.
Backing up a little bit, at theheight of our confusion, one of the assistants came over to us holding part ofa plastic bread sack. I should specifythat this assistant’s job is to handle the personal errands of the Number 2person at my workplace. I’ll say itagain: he is paid to handle personalerrands. The interns are notpaid, but it’s generally understood that our tasks should be office related, orat the very least, office tasks get priority.
This iscomplicated by the fact that this person is the assistant for one of the morepowerful people. Therefore, all tasksrelated to this person, no matter how menial, are to be given priority. Still, this person has two assistants tohandle the tasks. So in theory, thereshould be little that trickles down to us.
Yeah,right.
But I’mgetting off track… back to the bread sack…
“Uh guys,we need one of you to make some calls to some stores, and find out who carriesthis kind of bread. Try [OverratedStore #1] or [Overrated Store #2] and… well… any other place you can thinkof. It’s really important.”
Suffice it to say, the placewhere I work has nothing to do with bread. This isn’t a business errand. And, yeah, they don’t pay me, but they also don’t pay me to do that.
I wait three beats, give him the“you have got to be Smurfing joking” look, and say, “It might be a while.”
You see, by this point there wereat least five other major requests for copies, and all of them had to be donefast. Plus the mail needed to be takendown the street and the other intern is the only one permitted to do that. This left me as the only one to do the finalsteps of copying “Task 1.”
Let me explain something aboutthe copiers where I work. You have toinput a code correspondent to the person you are doing the copies for. If the machine is left idle for a fewminutes, it automatically logs out and resets all the settings. This posed a problem, as we didn’t want tolose the specifications we’d spent half an hour working to figure out. But the mail was due for pickup soon, and westill had all those other copies to do. The only option was for me to do those copies while the other intern randown the street.
Unfortunately, I still had tocover the reception desk and answer the phone, meaning I spent about fifteenminutes constantly running back and forth between the front desk and the copyroom like a chicken with my head cut off.
Somehow I get it done andjuggled, and just as the other intern returns, the copies are done. (Not all of them, just Task 1). He rushes them upstairs, and I take a breathbefore figuring out how to accommodate the other requests.
It is in this brief respite thatthe other assistant for Number 2 walks over and sees the bread wrapping. She asks, “Did you track this down?” Patiently, perhaps too patiently, I explainthat there are a lot of things we’ve been assigned and we’re nowhere nearcatching up. “It could be a while,” I tellher. She takes it and disappears intoher office area. For a moment, I’mfoolish enough to think that I’ve been relieved of that task.
Two minutes later, the otherassistant shows up. “Have you guyscalled these places yet?” (You see howit works: She kicked him, so he has tokick me.) So I explain it again,stopping just short of saying that this is a prime example of why there shouldbe a real receptionist here rather than assigning an intern to “playreceptionist.”
He seems disappointed, but I’dfeel a lot guiltier if I didn’t know the guy has a habit of dumping these tasksand making them sound like a priority when there are more important things tobe done. He walks off again.
The other intern returns. “Uh, I screwed up. He didn’t want these three hole punched. We have to do them again.”
Now this isn’t as simple as justrunning it through the copier, because the holes will leave black marks on theside of the copies. I think you can seewhere this is going.
Yep. We have to start all overagain on these copies. There’s another20 minutes wasted.
It gets better. Remember how I said the mail had to go outearlier? Well, now someone who wasn’tpaying attention at mail call needs something sent out, so I have to send theintern out again before the next and final pickup in 30 minutes.
Once more I play the headlesschicken. Cluck, cluck.
And it’s here that the phonestarts ringing off the hook. Usually Ijust have to transfer people, so it’s not taxing in that sense, but it’simpossible to juggle all these tasks at once.
An hour or so later, we’refinally caught up. I can almost smellthe other assistant coming with the bread bag again when I’m given anotheroffice related task. So I spend an houron this mind-numbing chore, but at least get to avoid the humiliation ofcalling around asking for bread.
Maybe, maybe, if I was getting paid I’d have a bitmore of a sense of humor about it. Fornow I’m telling myself it’ll pay off when I sell this story as a sitcom script.
