Welcome to Intern Horrors, the weekly feature where interns, and the titans of industry who employ them, bitch about each other's deplorable behavior. This week we have what WFAN's really like, the perils of the music biz, combing through files, and more.
This anonymous reader has a story about interning at a notable radio station:
I interned at WFAN recently, you know, the home of everybody's arrogant fat friend Mike Francesa and the hilarious tandem of Boomer and Carton in the Morning. There are a lot of good people that work there but there are also some dirty, rotten, piece of shit douschers that work there as well. A lot of them think their shit smells like Willy Wonka's candy asshole. Anyway, I was working the morning shift from 6 a.m. to noon. This requires me to get up at 3 in the morning and make my way into New York City by train. Not very fun. As the morning wares on, some of the afternoon staff rolls in around 10 o'clock. These people are mostly Mike Francesa's staff since he goes on the air at 1 p.m. So his guys come into work very early to do the prep for that afternoon's show. Anyway, there's this one guy who I actually didn't really dislike before this incident. He's not really a bad guy. But the thing is, he's one of those guys who thinks he's the MAN just because he works at that radio station and has had a few on-air overnight shifts. He's pompous and thinks he knows more about sports than anybody in the entire world. I've heard some of the things he says and it's clear that I know just as much as he does, if not more. So I'm sitting there and I happened to be watching a highlight of a Phillies game. The Phillies crushed whoever it was they were playing by 10 runs. I mutter to myself, "The Phillies are gonna steamroll the national league". The guy in question (call him Rob) starts flipping a shit on me. I thought he was going to keel over and have a brain aneurysm from how loud he was yelling at how red he got. He says word for word, "Are you an intern? Sit the fuck down you don't know SHIT about sports you fuckin retard! Steamroll the national league? Are you fucking kidding me? When were you born 1988? Then you clearly no ABSOLUTE SHIT ABOUT SPORTS! Sit your ass down and don't fuckin speak". I didn't know why he got so angry at that comment, so I went on the defensive. Immediately I start jawing back at him and we get into a back and forth about the topic at hand. The other guy in the newsroom at the time jumps to my aide but then starts getting screamed at by Rob too. The whole thing ended with me calling him out for being 30 years old and still living in his parents' basement. Yes, it got personal. I never talked to him again and I never will.
The moral of the story, as always: Never say anything to anyone, anywhere.
Here's Ben and his tale of a boss's freakout over a balky computer:
So I worked for a booking agency in Williamsburg in the summer of 2005, right after I graduated college. I had gotten the job because I had formed a good relationship with someone there while I was still in college. However, he left and I had this job where I knew nobody. I stood out like a sore thumb, a fat kid in cargo shorts in a sea of skinny people in jeans and long sleeve shirts. It was a small shop at the time and I was doing menial tasks, like checking emails and sending emails, two days a week. I even got to organize the massive CD collection. The perks were the occasional free show and free lunch every day. However, as the summer went on I realized this was going nowhere and I was sort of miserable because I didn't fit in the industry at all. The second to last day I was going to be there we had a big tour announced and a few of the dates came out wrong. As my boss is scrambling to fix this, his computer starts acting up. As the other guy in the office is on the phone with the Apple people, my boss is getting more and more agitated. He is yelling every time his computer fucks up, which is basically every 5 seconds. Finally, he screams, slams his laptop shut, knocks the remote to the stereo off his desk shattering it, throws a large cup of coffee against the wall, and walks out slamming the door as hard as he can. He came back 20 minutes later and told me to clean up the mess. I got to mop up the mess his 3/4 full large cup of coffee made as he threw it against the wall, a task that included Windexing the framed posters in the line of fire. Needless to say, I have never looked back and my boss has gone on to be super successful, probably because he is amazing at what he does, temper tantrums that would embarrass 8 year olds aside.
Here's Matt's story of hanging around in a damp basement:
In high school I interned for a summer at a lawfirm in this small historic town. While most of the summer was spent doing boring filing, paper shredding, phone answering, etc. there was one task the lawyers wanted me to perform before I left that was awful. Being a historic town, most of the buildings in the area were very old, built sometime in the early to mid 1800's, and the office was actually an 1840's house converted to a small office. The problem was all the basements in these old houses were notorious for flooding, and in the 50 odd years the lawfirm had been there, the files had not been moved off the ground (they were not in file cabinets, just in acordian folders lying on the ground). These files were absolutely disgusting, they were covered in mold from sitting in flood water over the years, some of them to the point of disintegration. It was my job to box up these files and put them on raised platforms, exposing me to all kinds of mold, mildew, insects and critters that had made themselves a home in the cool, damp files. Obviously they had no gloves or masks at the office, and I was not allowed on my first day to run out to grab some. I figured since I was in the basement it would be appropriate to come the next day in jeans and sneaks so as to not destroy my nice pants/shoes, but I was promptly reprimanded and forced to go home and change. Needless to say I did not go into the law...
This anonymous submitter didn't know that Blood Week ended:
When I was in college, I interned at a hospital in the Minneapolis area. My internship was as an IT slug - core responsibilities were: Being Lazy, responding to pages, walking around the hospital, replacing computers, helping doctors figure out why their monitors were broken aka turned off... etc etc etc
I have never been afraid or squeamish around blood, injuries, or accidents, which i chalk up to movies and videogames.
What I saw, and inadvertently participated in, was one of the most disturbing things a 19 year old IT kid should have to deal with.
I got a 911 page, which required immediate response. It was from the emergency room, a computer had failed during an emergency surgery.
I ran down to the emergency room, suited up in a sterile bunny suit, complete with goggles, facemask and blue booties for my shoes. As I walked in they told me that the computer had frozen, and needed to be fixed asap - as it contained all the medical records and timing for the surgery.
The gentleman on the table had just been in a motorcycle accident.
I got to the PC, got it going again, when a nurse told me that their remote monitor was still down. This monitor is next to the operating table. I quickly moved over to the screen, and it took about 10 minutes to fix what the issue was. In this 10 minutes, I experienced the following:
A torn arm being cut off. Blood spray when they clipped an artery - hitting me in the face, a doctor yelling "goddamnit if we cant stop this bleeding we are going to have problems." There was blood everywhere. His skin was literally HANGING from the bone, and they had to saw off his lower arm, about mid-way to the elbow.
I will never in my life ever pretend that what i see in the movies isnt a big deal. Saving Private Ryan? Seems pretty damn accurate to me now. Jesus H. Christ.
Were you a paid-with-college-credit-that-you-paid-for worker? Did you hire one of those earnest, incompetent bastards? Send me your stories, subject line: Intern Horrors.