On the joy of truly trivial internships

Trying to find an internship in New York City as a freshman was like walking around the greatest amusement park in the world before I was tall enough to ride the roller coasters. So, when a friend of my dad's friend found me a position at a "very distinguished brokerage firm," I couldn't have been more excited. So blinded by the lights was I that I didn't care when my dad's friend explicitly instructed me to "never speak his name" at my new job.

The interview was something of a formality, I was told, a chance for me to show off my lack of knowledge and charisma. I was brought into my boss' corner office and asked to sit across the desk from him, while he was talking on the phone. I figured this was normal; though it seemed less normal by about the 30th minute of listening to him discuss some sort of towel warehouse. When he finally hung up the phone, he greeted me:

"I have a little hobby"

I thought about what hobby would involve so many towels that a warehouse was needed. Ok, I thought, but what kind of person collects towels?

"It's called Real Estate."

My boss was a very wealthy man. How wealthy? Well one of my projects was to assemble a filing system so that he could keep track of his exotic car collection, because he had so many that he might forget where one was parked. This seemed a particularly cruel exercise to subject me to, when I was making just less than minimum wage for my efforts. In fact, counting living expenses — $2,000 for a small room with a George Foreman grill — and food — prepared, almost exclusively, with said grill — I actually lost money on my internship.

It was all worth it, though, for the valuable business skills I learned. One skill I learned was filing. It was actually much harder than I expected, owing to the severely dented filing cabinets that my company used. Not only were the cabinets difficult to open but the drawers were built in such a way that once one drawer was open you couldn't open any of the others. In one of my less proud moments, I wrote the following blog entry musing over the reason for this decision:

In an office supplies factory far away:

Engineer: Hmm, I will design this filing cabinet so that only one drawer can be open at a time.

Sensible boss: Could you please explain why.

Engineer: Could you please stop standing on my foot?

Sensible boss (looks down, he is accidentally standing on the engineers foot): Oh sorry, I didn't mean to. (lifts foot)

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And so the sensible boss was distracted and embarrassed because the engineer's foot was now broken on account of his incredibly fragile skeletal system, and the engineer got away with his diabolical plan.

It was the little things that kept me going. One day, I stumbled upon a tattered receipt, "Playboy TV, $9.99", marked for filing. I put it in "Other." Another day I played a little game I invented where I would pretend to be filing papers carefully, but actually do it completely randomly.

But for every survival trick I could think of, they were able to find some way to beat me down. A high point of degradation was certainly the day I was given a $5 book which was 200 pages-long and told to photocopy every page. There was a book store next door, and I asked, "Wouldn't it be smarter just to buy the book instead of taking the time to photocopy it?"

"No," they said, "we don't wanna waste the money."

After two weeks of filing and photocopying, I had finished everything they had ready for me to do that summer, so they began inventing tasks. Firstly, I was to move all of the files from the old, broken cabinets, to new cabinets they had just purchased.

I tried to make myself feel better by telling myself that this task was actually not that different from what stock brokers do. The old cabinets were people selling their stocks, and the new cabinets were buying them. My imaginary brokerage firm did a really good job, and all of the stocks were being quickly bought up. These are the pathetic self-delusions of a professional filer.

At the end of the internship my boss pulled me aside.

"You did well," he said, "you are welcome to come back next year."

I leave for China on June 15. I imagine that the boss has a massive stack of papers piled high in his office awaiting the next poor fool just trying to get his foot in the door. Tom Knight is a sophomore from San Juan Capistrano. He can be reached at ttknight@princeton.edu.