let’s hear your weird summer intern stories

by Alison Green on June 27, 2024

Over the years, we’ve heard about an an intern who gave another intern a tattoo in the office conference room; an intern who set up a cot for himself in a large open work space, complete with pillow shams; an intern who was blown away by an electric stapler; an intern who desperately wanted to work from a patio, and many more.

With summer internships in full swing, we must hear your weirdest/funniest/worst stories about interns. And what the hell, if you have a heart-warming stories, we want those too. Please share in the comments!

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  1. Too Long Til Retirement*

    You forgot to mention the interns who broke in and stole from the restaurant after a work dinner!

    But in all seriousness, the only “unusual” intern story I have is that one of our interns loved to work in the dark. We shared an office, and the intern’s desk was behind the open door. One of my coworkers got jump scared because all the lights were off and she was not expecting someone to be there. This same intern was also really hard to talk to….making conversation was like pulling teeth.

    1. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

      I wonder if your intern is related to the guy who lit his office with candles rather than turn on the lights.

    2. Hlao-roo*

      For anyone who missed the interns who stole from a restaurant letter Too Long Til Retirement is referencing, it’s the first letter of the “interns stole alcohol at a work retreat, vacationing with a friend from work, and more” post from June 19, 2024.

      The letter-writer added a few details in the comments under the name “LW1”

    3. Bast*

      So… I understand the lights thing. Certain offices have really harsh lighting, and if you are prone to migraines it can be *really* horrible. Obviously, in many environments it isn’t acceptable to just turn the lights off but I get that they bother some people.

      1. Dawn*

        Yeah I think the invention of fluorescent lighting is honestly one of the worst things that ever happened to office workers. It’s not healthy.

        1. Takki*

          On the bright side, they make LED bulbs styled like those big long fluorescent tube bulbs. They’re amazing. They’re so bright you only need one in every other fixture, and 0 flicker.

      2. Jess*

        Or if you are J, you sit in the dark wearing sunglasses first thing in the morning bc you were made to come in with a “migraine’, when really you just got baked out of your gourd on the way in to work. Magically, the migraine is gone an hour later and you are fine, if sleepy.

      3. H3llifIknow*

        A coworker put a huge golf umbrella over a large portion of her cube. When her manager told her to take it down, she refused and got a letter from her doctor, because she was seated right under a flourescent light whose near constant flicker, especially when combined with the constant stream of refrigerated air blowing from the vent next to it, gave her violent migraines. She was willing to quit over this, but was way too valuable to lose, so eventually they gave in and said she could keep it. (We weren’t client facing, who cared?)

        1. AngryOctopus*

          How lovely that they couldn’t bother to fix the things (that would drive anyone crazy, TBH) and just made this poor woman put up a golf umbrella to block out the horror.

          1. Reluctant Mezzo*

            I had to set up a big piece of cardboard on one side of my cubicle because of a flickering tube. Everyone in the area broke out into open applause when the maintenance person removed it.

            2. Pennyworth*

              I’m sure it wouldn’t be allowed these days, but in my first job there was the occasional flickering fluorescent tube. One of us would just climb on the desk below it and rotate the tube to disconnect it. When enough lights were out the maintenance guy would be called in to replace them.

        2. Bast*

          We had someone in Old Job who made their cubicle into a tent with blankets because the lighting on that floor was just awful. Of course, moving her to a different floor where the lighting was less harsh was just *out of the question* but having her make a tent everyday was fine. This office was so strange because the lights on certain floors were very harsh on certain floors, and virtually non-existent on others.

        3. JustaTech*

          My coworker set up this leaf canopy from IKEA (I think it was intended for a child’s bed) over her desk to deal with the fluorescent light. I thought it looked quite nice, and one day I tried it and discovered, actually, the lights were actually bothering me (I’d just never worked anywhere without them so I didn’t notice until it went away).

          So then I had a leaf as well, giving our office a vaguely tropical feel. I asked where she’d gotten the idea and she pointed out another building near ours where you could see a whole floor of cubes, each with their own leaf.

          Thankfully, when they changed our desks so there wasn’t anywhere to attach the leaf they also brought in dynamic LED lights and the leaf wasn’t really needed anymore.

          1. Mary*

            I work at a company where this was absolutely the standard in one of our previous office locations! A sea of ikea leaves, and you could expense them to the department.

          2. Worldwalker*

            I have a couple of those leaves! I used to use them to keep a ceiling fan in my living room from causing an unnecessary breeze exactly where I sat. I don’t need them at the moment, but they’re carefully packed away until I need them again. (or just want a big leaf over my chair, because they look cool)

          3. GythaOgden*

            LEDs are great. There’s a massive national project under way around the public healthcare sites we manage to fit them and when our building got done last year, it made so much of a difference.

            We were on reception so we couldn’t have fancy stuff but it solved so many issues we’d had with bad lighting, particularly in the winter where it gets dark at 4pm and so it’s either sit in flicker or sit in the dark (both of which were migraine inducing; the darkness just exacerbated the problem with using a bright screen in dim lighting, and I ended up in active pain but unable to just pack up and leave because coverage :(…). While it took a bit of time for people to adjust to the slightly brighter LEDs (and when one building I now help manage just got slated to have them installed, the staff were actively warned that people would complain initially but those complaints would be transient as they were the natural result of people getting used to different lights, and research from elsewhere had shown that people took a bit of time to get used to them and then the complaints tailed off) it’s just so, so much better overall, not just for us but for the environment as well.

      4. Fives*

        We have our overhead lights off but most of us have windows, desk lamps or both, so we’re still well-lit, just not with the fluorescent overheads.

      5. Ant*

        I work in an office with harsh fluorescent lights, and I have migraines – I ended up having to buy blue light filtering glasses to make them a little less relentless on my eyes. There have definitely been days where I have been tempted to ask if I could turn off even half of the lights, but sadly with the way they’re laid out that’d turn out the lights above my coworker’s desk as well.

        1. Worldwalker*

          Are you sure your coworker is not also being bothered by the lights? If not, you might want to ask — it’s possible that they would also like them off.

        2. Mouse named Anon*

          They sell covers for fluorescent lights on amazon and other shops. Alot of schools/medical facilites use them for students with Autism and other mental health disorders.

    4. MissesPookie*

      I worked in an office once where they turned the lights off in the summer and we basically worked in the dark. So odd.

        1. Typity*

          I worked in an office where we mostly worked in semi-darkness, and when someone wanted the lights on they were expected to yell “Lights!” so everyone could be emotionally prepared — otherwise a chorus of moans would go up from the whole cubicle farm. We didn’t have developers and engineers, though — just a lot of college students :)

          2. anon24*

            Sounds like EMS when day shift comes in to relieve night shift :)
            If night shift isn’t warned of the incoming brightness, there tends to be angry vampire hisses.

        2. JustaTech*

          Also some very specific types of lab scientists (who work with materials that were very light sensitive 30 years ago, and so now all habitually work in the semi-dark).

      2. Box of Kittens*

        I share a large office space with three other folks, and our space has really nice windows so we keep our overheads off and go off natural light all the time (except occasionally in the winter), blinds down but open. I have suitemates who work in an identical setup down the hall and they sometimes keep the blinds fully closed with overhead, which is so ugly to me, and sometimes they open the blinds fully up. I don’t understand their reasoning behind what lighting to use on any given day; I’m just glad I’m over here because lighting really matters to my mental health.

        1. Sheworkshardforthemoney*

          I worked in an office where the managers had offices with windows. They all kept their office doors closed so there was no natural light in the reception area. I became depressed because I never saw daylight at all during my work day. Returning to work after lunch was like going to prison.

      3. canuckian*

        If there wasn’t AC or good AC, they might’ve done that because working in a dark(ened) room makes your brain think it’s cooler…so you feel cooler. But if there was AC, then yeah. Kinda odd.

      4. Bankerchick*

        I worked in a bank as a teller. The platform (desk people) were exempt at the time, while tellers were always hourly. Since they made the platform stay later every day, the bank had the bright idea to have the tellers close and have the platform open to clients. They figured clients might be able to get there easier and the employees could get some sales. Except when people found the door open, they assumed they could see a teller. We needed to stay 30-45 minutes after we closed to balance and put stuff away. So, they had the “bright” idea of turning out the lights over the teller line, figuring people would get the hint. Ugh… it was a mess and this was before smart phones. We had to bring in flashlights because there were no windows to let light in. That idea didn’t last long. I had already said it was a silly idea, but what did I know.

      5. Lola*

        I would love this. When I started my new job I brought table lamps into my office and turned off the flourescent overhead lights. Several of my coworkers followed suit when they realized how much nicer it was.

    5. fhqwhgads*

      I’m assuming the origin story of this request was at least partially prompted by that story since it was so recent.

    6. Anonymel*

      So, I support a govt. program office and had to go visit one of our prime contractors and was given a tour of their campus. One building was their “quiet/dark” building. No lights, whispered conversations, etc… It was so weird to me, but our contact said that everyone is asked their preferred work environment when hired and they do their best to accommodate, and a large number of (predominantly younger) sw engineers, developers, etc… like the dark!

    7. spiffi*

      I did a 4 month stint work co-op when I was in college. We had a lovely building with lots of windows – and one day I was all by myself in our area and the fluorescent lights were off – and it was SO nice to just have *daylight*.

      It was lunch time, and I had eaten my lunch at my desk, and was sitting and working – and as people started coming back from lunch, one at a time, each person would walk in, go “hey the lights are off” and flip them on. I would call out “oh no! leave them off” – and they would confusedly turn them back off.

      I made it through about 5-6 people before the next person didn’t turn them back off and was like “we need lights!” – we *really* didn’t need any lights but some people just could NOT deal with the lights being off in a fully lit room….

      In my last office (pre-lockdown) we rarely had the lights on – we had huge windows and there was no need for lights, unless it was winter and actually dark out. Same thing now that I work from home – unless it is gloomy and grey or dark out – I never put the light on and I am happy to just work by daylight!

      1. Zelda*

        At one gig many years ago, I had a tiny office of my own with a window, which did not even have any kind of a blind. I did as you did and worked by natural light, because why expend the electricity when there was already a ton of light? I was reprimanded for this, and my boss would come by and turn my lights on if I ever dared not to do so when I got in. The only reasoning he ever offered (although he couldn’t muster up much conviction; I’m not sure he understood himself) was that we ‘looked closed’ if one office light was off. Reader, we were not open to the public.

      2. Sheworkshardforthemoney*

        My current workplace has large open spaces with large windows at the top designed to let in natural light. At this time of year when the sun is bright and shining by 600AM we still have people who come into the building and flip on the lights. There is so much sunshine pouring in that you can’t see the lights. But they still turn them on.

        1. ADDAnon*

          I’m one of those lights on people! My migraines are triggered by differences in light. So if I have a dim workspace but then look up into a bright window, or if there’s alternating light/dark strips because the sun is shining directly at mini-blinds and they’re behind someone I’m talking to.

    8. MuseAnne*

      My windowless office has motion activated lights, which means the lights go out if I’m just sitting at my computer. I have to move my chair and wave my arms to turn them on, so I’m often happily working in the dark with just my desk lamp on. Another bonus is that the fluorescent light immediately above my desk burned out years ago, and I live in dread of the day that our custodians call it in.

      1. canuckian*

        Can’t you ask them not to replace it? In my larger library, after the lights burnt out near/over my desk, I just asked our custodians not to replace them. They’ve been quite happy to comply.

  2. Falling Diphthong*

    I shall forever treasure the napping cot shams, which are the detail that makes a napping cot professional.

    1. londonedit*

      I don’t know what a sham is, but I still love the idea. Also I imagine a cot in this scenario is like a fold-out bed, but where I am we only use it in the context of a cot that babies sleep in, so I can’t help imagining this intern all tucked up in a baby’s cot, which makes it even funnier.

      1. Irish Teacher.*

        Yeah, I was going to point out that in Ireland, a cot is what I think the Americans call a crib, anyway a baby’s bed with bars around it.

      2. Liane*

        A sham is a bedpillow cover, makes it look a bit like a throw pillow. It’s heavier (all I’ve seen are quilted) and the opening is at the back, not one end.

        1. Liane*

          In the US, a cot is a free standing fold up bed (not a pull out from a couch). It’s narrower than a twin. Can also be a similar bed for camping.

      3. Wilbur*

        Shams are little curtains with ruffles on them for the bottom of your bed, because it was apparently a faux pas in the past to be able to see underneath the bed.

        1. Ghee Buttersnaps*

          I believe what you are describing would be a bed “skirt.” The sham is a decorative cover that goes over a pillow for show.

              1. Lenora Rose*

                “No, you’re thinking of slam. A sham is where you publicly embarrass someone for a social gaffe.”

                1. New Jack Karyn*

                  No, that’s a shame. A sham is when people email or call, pretending to be the IRS and steal your money

                2. Zelda*

                  No, that’s a scam. A sham is a slender wedge of material you use to correct the angle at which something sits, especially a wobbly table.

                3. Cathie from Canada*

                  No, that’s a shim. A sham is where the bases are loaded and the next batter hits a home run.

        3. Falling Diphthong*

          Hmm. I definitely pictured the little ruffled bed skirts.

          The pillows you can’t actually sleep on are one of my most hated and/or mystified by design elements, so I would look down on the intern if these shams are actually pillows you can’t use as pillows.

        4. Overthinking it*

          I believe you are thinking of a “bedskirt” or “dustruffle”. possible it’s called a “sham” in some places (but why?) but these were pillow shams, I believe, so called because they make the pillows look larger, like upholstered cushion. A fakeout, and therefore, a “sham!”

      4. Overthinking it*

        A sham is a fancy pillow cover, the kind with a ruffle or flange a around all four sides, making the pillow look larger. sometimes the pillow are fitted into the shams (like a big, fancy pillowcase) and sometimes the shams are just laid over the pillows on the made-up bed.

      5. Venus*

        I’m used to the term for a baby but also know cot in reference to an army cot, probably from MASH or a similar show. It is the most basic of beds with a piece of canvas stretched over a metal frame with short feet that can often be folded in half.

    2. Juicebox Hero*

      In American, a cot is a fold-up bed that’s smaller than a regular bed with a thin mattress. They’re a sitcom staple because they tend to be hard to set up, collapse when slept on, and rather uncomfortable.

      A pillow sham is a decorative pillow covering made of fabric matches the bedspread (cotspread?) that’s thicker than a regular pillowcase. It often has embroidery or ruffles around the edge. They’re meant to show that you Care how your bed looks.

      1. bamcheeks*

        these used to be called z-beds in the UK (where Z rhymes with bed), but thinking about it I haven’t seen one for years and I don’t know what they’re called now. I think inflatables got good enough that the z-bed was retired.

        1. londonedit*

          Yes, I was going to say I always knew them as zed-beds! I think you’re right, inflatable air beds must have rendered the zed-bed obsolete.

          1. Snoodence Pruter*

            Yes! My best friend in junior school had a zed-bed that we got out for sleepovers and once it folded up with her in the middle like a death sandwich. But I haven’t seen one for decades. Air beds all the way.

        2. Ally McBeal*

          Yeah I’d say inflatables have made cots practically obsolete. A hotel or motel might still have them, or the family cabin/vacation home, but I can’t imagine they’re used regularly anywhere outside (maybe) the military.

          1. Bruce*

            We still prefer a cot with a camp mattress, most inflatables are pretty low to the ground and hard on old knees to get up and get down. In fact, my son is moving to a new town next week and he’ll be camping out in his apartment using our cot until his shipment arrives… looking forward to having him a 2 hour drive away instead of 20 hours :-)

            1. A. in the Midwest*

              We own multiple “Double Height” Inflatable Mattresses. They’re at least 24″ off the ground & I think our newest one is 30″ high.

              They have chambers within them to give them more structure & so that you don’t sink in the middle. Super comfortable, easy to get in & out of, & still very portable (& more compact).

              We have had to sleep on inflatable mattresses for 6+ weeks at a time (when moving & travel @ other people’s homes), so we’ve tried multiple different types. The double height mattresses are awesome, even with 2 adults.

              We have multiple cats & dogs & have had no problems with them causing damage. The cats have always slept on the bed with us.

              While visiting my brother’s house, I once woke up to find his 2 dogs (70# each) & my dog (70#) all on the bed with me (120#). They had all managed to climb up without waking me… which I was really impressed with, as it’s still a queen size air bed & not a standard mattress.

          2. LaurCha*

            Cots are not entirely obsolete in the cat-owning community. I don’t trust my beasts with an inflatable. :)

          3. Jen the Iffer*

            My extended family of dedicated campers are pretty solidly cot users, only a few still use the inflatables. They deflate, are hard to get off of and if you are sharing one with someone every single movement is transferred and you feel like you’re on a boat. Cots have come a long way baby, cushy pads and better constructed frames make them pretty comfy!

          4. Mad Harry Crewe*

            Hotels typically use rollaway beds, which fold so that the head and foot are pointed at the ceiling. A rollaway might not have the best mattress, but I would consider it an upgrade from a cot that you might take camping or put guests on.

        3. SarahKay*

          You can still buy them – I saw one for sale recently somewhere, and a quick google shows that both Amazon and John Lewis sell Z-beds, primarily made by a company called Jay-be, it looks like.
          And they still look remarkably like the one I used to sleep in when I stayed at my gran’s house 40-odd years ago.

        4. GythaOgden*

          We still have our Z-bed from the 1970s. The mattress is nothing but pink foam now (I don’t even remember it having had a cover at all and obviously we put a single fitted sheet on it/ but the frame is pretty damn sturdy to have coped with a dozen or so family members and their friends and relations that have used it, and it wanders from house to house depending on who needs it. It was in my spare room for a while but vanished one day in my mum’s SUV and while it will come back eventually, it hasn’t done so yet.

          I’ve more often heard ‘camp-bed’ as the generic name for the less sturdy, less comfortable versions. I think Z-bed sounds like a brand name but I’d have to Google it and I’m way too hungry to bother with that RN.

        5. Jules the First*

          Nope – they’re all over NHS children’s wards for the parents who have to stay overnight. If you’re lucky. They are unexpectedly comfortable – I’ve had some very good nights on those things!

          If you are unlucky, your ward is equipped with convertible chair-beds which are simultaneously weirdly claustrophobic and excessively exposed (and so incredibly uncomfortable that I would rather pretzel into the not-long-enough-for-adults junior hospital bed around my sleeping kiddo than attempt to spend the night on the chair/torture device).

          1. Reluctant Mezzo*

            I hear you about the hospital chair-beds, I remember one from one of my husband’s surgeries. I contemplated bringing a foam topper for the floor if I ever had to do that again.

      2. Artemesia*

        in my youth they were called ‘Army cots’ and were canvas with wood legs that had to be set up — common portable bed. Of course now they are metal and easier to set up.

  3. Anonforthis77*

    My fellow intern brought in a wild rabbit and her baby bunnies into work one day. Just a giant cardboard box filled with bunnies. Surprisingly, it took three days for anyone to decide to tell him that while the impulse was good, a Federal government building was maybe not the best place for an entire family of wild rabbits.

    1. Anonymous cat*

      Did he leave the bunnies there overnight or did he take them back and forth every day?

      Both are bad ideas but I’m trying to imagine commuting with bunnies…

    2. Dust Bunny*

      I recently kept a cat in the office utility room for two days: The first because I found it abandoned in its carrier on my way to work, and the second because I was taking it to a co-foster home in the evening. (I took it home with me overnight in between, of course.) It was too big to keep in a carrier–I’ve found kittens before and had to keep them with me in my office but they were small enough to keep in my bigger cat carrier.

      Cat is getting spayed tomorrow and will be on her way to a new home next week.

      1. Siege*

        Yeah, I brought my cat to a meeting (in his stroller!) because I had a very complicated situation and couldn’t safely leave the cat at home due to another cat. (My cat is allergic to something in injectable medications, including vaccines, fleas, most flea medication, and walnuts, and therefore not a candidate for boarding.) But that’s a far cry from a wild bunny family, and I have a lot of capital at work.

          1. Siege*

            There’s a kind of cat litter made from ground-up walnut shells. I decided to try it one time in case it was less trackable than the wheat litter I usually use, and my cat had red, puffy eyelids and extra wheezing until I changed the box, exactly like he does when it’s pollen season. I forgot to mention that my cat also has pollen allergies. I should just put him in a bubble.

            3. Wired Wolf*

              We use a corn litter (World’s Best Litter is the brand). Low-tracking and our old guy is no longer sneezing all the time.

              1. Songbird121*

                World’s best all the way! I have no idea why it tracks less, but my cat had to use corn litter after a procedure and for the first time ever there wasn’t litter all over the house. I’ve never gone back.

        2. rebelwithmouseyhair*

          I take my hat off to you, for the level of care that has resulted in determining that list of allergies is truly impressive.

        1. Dust Bunny*

          Yes. I found her on my walk between the train stop and work. I almost drove in that day and if I had I wouldn’t have seen her. If nobody else found her it would have been two days later and I’m afraid I might have found a d**d cat instead, which is a horrifying thought. But she’s safe now.

          I’m averaging a found cat every 2-3 years. I’m not even looking for them. I kept the first one and the other three have good homes.

            1. Artemesia*

              All our cats and my best friend’s cats (who lives 2000 miles away from me) have been cats that chose us. Cats have a knack for securing an ‘owner’ and getting housed and fed.

          2. House On The Rock*

            I’m not a particularly spiritual or superstitious person, except when it comes to believing that the Great Universal Cat Consciousness absolutely pairs good and loving people with cats in need! Best of luck to the kitty in her new home, and thank you for your wonderful work!

          3. MotherofaPickle*

            My family say that “animals find me”. So far, two dogs and five cats. We just put the Old Man dog down, so I’m expecting to run across some poor animal that needs love any day now.

          1. Zinnia*

            Maybe, but, I’m also assuming Dust Bunny may also have checked with their local police department and told “nope, no one’s reported a gray striped cat with a white left front paw who was left behind in a cat carrier around 9am at the Orange Tree train stop.” I’d be willing to bet once the cat’s parent realized Kitty was gone they would have made frantic calls to the police.

            Of course, I’m not ruling out the possibility that Kitty was intentionally abandoned out of ignorance or cruelty or revenge. In which case, in the 2 latter, the cat is better off with someone to care for it.

      3. ProducerNYC*

        Thank you for saving that poor cat- and getting her fixed AND a new home!! This just made my whole entire day. The amount of suffering you are helping to prevent is just unreal. I hope you hit only green lights when you’re driving!! : )

      5. mli25*

        This makes my foster heart very happy. Husband and I foster kitties (20 and counting). Our boy is a foster win :)

      6. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

        Good work on the rescue, and it doesn’t sound like it was disruptive at work. Yay!

    3. NameRequired*

      Which part of the impulse was good?? I’ve heard of people taking baby bunnies because they think the mom is gone but he just brought in the whole family????

      1. Lexi Vipond*

        Maybe mum was injured and he brought the youngsters too while he tried to look after her?

    4. NothingIsLittle*

      Local government, not federal, but you’d be surprised what people get away with! One woman adopted a feral kitten from their parking lot, but it was still being weaned and she had to feed it every two hours… so she brought it to work instead of working from home. (Her director put an end to that, haha)

      Right now, our Domestic Animal Services is rebuilding one of their shelters, so there are a bunch of foster dogs living in offices or coming to work with department heads until the new shelter is finished. (Apparently they are very distracting!)

      2. Texan In Exile*

        I would like that director a lot more if she had supported caring for an orphaned kitten. :(

        2. Hlao-roo*

          Hopefully NothingIsLittle can clarify, but I read the comment as the director put an end to bottle feeding the kitten in the office (sothe woman work from home until the kitten was weaned).

          1. NothingIsLittle*

            Yes! The woman worked from home until the kitten was weaned (and I believe her husband also helped when she needed to be in-person for meetings). By all accounts it was super distracting to have a kitten that young in the office!

            3. UKDancer*

              Yes also some people like me have allergies so having kittens in offices can be unwise. I mean I like cats but I also like breathing.

      3. Dog and cat fosterer*

        I have bottle fed a couple pups when I had a full-day off-site work meeting for two days. I called the venue and asked if they were okay with animals, and they said all pets were welcome so I brought them with me! I fed them quietly on breaks and had quite a loyal following of a small group of people who happily cuddled them each break, but I ensured they were tucked away in their carrier during the meetings. They were at the perfect age that they never made a noise and the guy sitting next to me was surprised at the end of the second day when I asked if he’d noticed my strange bag, so I know that it wasn’t a distraction to our work.

        With both the pups and kittens I always arranged with my boss to work from home most of the time. I have no idea what I would have done if that venue didn’t allow pets, but thankfully it wasn’t an issue!

      4. Reluctant Mezzo*

        One of our factories got rid of all the feral cats. Then they discovered what the feral cats had been doing, and had to call in the pest removers for all the mice and rats. :)

        1. Suzannah*

          Oh, cats earn their keep – people just don’t realize it until after they are gone.

    5. Rage*

      Funny, I used to do wildlife rehab, and a fellow rehabber – she did mammals and birds, while I only did raptors – she worked at the state Dept of Transportation and would regularly bring critters into her office. Her colleagues loved to help bottle feed baby possums, hand-feed baby owls, etc., etc. Of course, she was a long-time employee and not an intern.

      1. Rainy*

        I would trample any number of colleagues to be the one who got to bottle feed a baby possum or skunk or hand-feed an owlet.

          1. GythaOgden*

            Yeah. There’s a lot of cute things that can be compatible with work, but kitten rearing may present a lot of challenges, particularly if colleagues might have allergies or it would be distracting. We work on hospital or healthcare property, and while we do have dedicated offices, there’s issues with animals being on site with vulnerable patients. We do have one maintenance guy whose dog just had puppies (puppy ultrasound is a thing now…he breeds working dogs as a hobby business so we all look forward to seeing successive litters come into the world) and we have another manager colleague who put two of her kittens up for adoption…and cried buckets when they left (as did baby sis when her baby bro was claimed first).

            Plenty of cats probably stray across a lot of the sites but I’d imagine we’d suggest adopting out if one set up home in a place where it could cause issues. That’s nothing against anyone wanting to foster kitties at home or provide care during breaks, it’s simply just that it’s not what you’re at work to do unless you work for a vet or a rescue or whatever. I am just waiting for the day that I can bring my own feline coworker home (look up the poem of Pangur Ban — this is so so so not new), but s/he wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near any offices of mine, unfortunately.

      2. ferrina*

        It makes a difference when it is directly related to your job.

        That said- I would absolutely find any excuse to drop by her office on critter days.

      3. FricketyFrack*

        I would die of joy. People bring their dogs in occasionally and they know they have to bring them by my department to say hi (we all want to see them, not just me) or we’ll riot, but if someone brought in a baby possum, I don’t know if I could handle it.

    6. Emily Byrd Starr*

      Even though I know wild animals belong in the wild, I can’t help but wish someone would bring a mother rabbit and her babies to my work, so we could all pet and cuddle them! I love rabbits. They’re so adorable! Even when they get into my vegetable garden, I say, “If you don’t get out of my garden, I’m going to pick you up and cuddle you like a stuffed animal!” (Yes, I know they can’t really understand me. It’s just a cute thing I do.)

      1. not nice, don't care*

        Wild buns are usually covered in fleas and have assorted parasites. They’re awful cute, but I’d never handle one without gloves and unless absolutely necessary. But I’m lucky to have enough land to support a few bun families and can watch them any time.

        1. Distracted Procrastinator*

          my house is in a subdivision with wild bunnies. They are truly adorable and we watch them run around the back yard several times a week. We do not pet them. We are tempted. But we resist.

      2. Laura*

        My dog once found a bunny nest in our garden and was very gently carrying an older baby bun around in his mouth. Luckily my dog has a very soft mouth and the bunny was unharmed so we cuddled a bit while we searched for the nest. So soft! Bunny appeared to be unscathed at the end of all this and we blocked the nest to prevent any further dog intrusion until the bunnies got a little bigger and left.

      3. Siege*

        I have considered, more than once, the feasibility of starting a business where I take small mammals (small size, not small type – cats, smaller dogs, rabbits, possibly friendly guinea pigs and chinchillas) around to offices for an hour of petting as a relaxation benefit.

        My conclusion is that thus far it is unfeasible for me due to apartment living, but I bet it would be something that would sell as an in-office perk to a lot of companies.

        1. quetzal*

          Funny enough the organization I work for brought in all kinds of animals for employee appreciation events. There were some with puppies, some with cats, some cows, and some reptiles. So apparently it is a thing.

      4. H3llifIknow*

        We bunnysat for a coworker of my husband’s once. It was….not cute and cuddly. Well maybe cute, but not cuddly. I cannot count how many times it bit my husband (not me because I stay away from anything in the rodent family).

        1. Dawn*

          Oh, yeah, bunnies are mean a lot of the time. And they scream like the devil.

          They’re cute and all but they’re generally best off being cute at one remove.

        3. Beth**

          When I first met my husband, he had a shirt with a hole in the sleeve from where he had been bitten while house/rabbit sitting for a friend. As a penniless grad student, he held on to the shirt for years, claiming that the holes were “so small they were almost unnoticeable”.

      5. Bunny!*

        My ex-mother-in-law felt like you do. One day she caught the cute little wild bunny hanging around. Brought it inside, tried to tame it. It gnawed every baseboard it could reach. They look terrible now.

        When both she and the father in law passed, the house was put up for sale. My current husband was very interested, but I told him the story of the baseboards, and we decided it probably wasn’t potty trained either, so there’s likely a lingering aroma from the floorboards.

    7. WeirdChemist*

      Back when my dad was a Fed, his office was in a crappily-built trailer. A stray cat once broke in and had kittens under his desk

    9. Student*

      Coming from a place where wild rabbits are considered vermin, that is just so hard to wrap my head around.

      Just stealing baby animals -of any type- from their home also sounds, frankly, completely awful and ghoulish. That would really color my perception of any co-worker, but especially an intern – I’d forever label that person as having bad judgement, and I’d be looking carefully for additional warning signs that they’re either very self-centered or an outright potential sociopath.

      I can’t even understand why anyone would call it a “good impulse”. That’s what you say to a toddler that wants to bring animals they see home – not to an adult who should’ve learned very long ago that wild animals are not pets.

      1. singular yike*

        The co-worker had the mother as well as the babies; it sounds like it was some kind of rehabbing (or rehabbit as I accidentally typed) situation. I don’t think baby animals were being stolen from their homes.

    10. OldHat*

      When I worked for a sustainability company, they had to send company-wide emails to not bring the wildlife into the office during the summer and don’t release the animals in traps. I doubt it was just interns doing this. IT, accountants, and facilities folks were a bit WTH but that tracks considering how granola the company was.

      They where right next to some preserves and undeveloped parts of tour, so we did see animals on a daily basis near the building.

    11. fidget spinner*

      A friend of mine used to work for the public library and she fostered bottle kittens and brought them to work with her. Although… I don’t think that lasted very long because her roommates were soon taking care of them while she was at work!

  4. LawDog*

    Law firm summer associate – got drunk on a dinner cruise and proceeded to flash all of the partners and their spouses. Not a good way to end the summer.

    1. Lab Boss*

      Would it have been the end of the summer any way? Or did it *become* the end of the summer because of the incident?

    2. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

      One of my classmates in law school danced on a table while wasted at a firm event (dressed, but still) and wondered why she didn’t get an offer.

  5. Anon4This*

    So this is less about the interns (though they were present!). I work for a theatre company that has an annual Gala where we hire a celebrity to come perform as part of the evening. My very first Gala we hired a well-known performer of theatre and film (if I said the name you’d know them). Now we hire annual interns who live on campus during their tenure, with rooms housed above the office spaces and even the theatre (not ideal, I know, but we’re working on it).

    Now Celeb was incredibly gracious in meeting our interns after the performance, taking picture, talking to them about a career in theatre. At some point in the evening (after I had gone home) Celeb and the interns ended up back in the building where our offices are, which also serves as the main house for interns. They then ended up in the office of our Artistic Director. And suddenly a joint came out (as I understand only Celeb and maybe someone from their crew partook). If all of that weren’t bad enough, the chair of our Board (who had been trying all night to meet/talk to Celeb) had strong armed one of my colleagues into finally taking her to Celeb. And she met Celeb. While Celeb smoked pot in our AD’s office. With a bunch of interns sitting around.

    1. Lab Boss*

      I’m hoping the interns didn’t get in trouble for that- I mean yes, the ideal thing would have been to prevent it from happening, but I’m not sure I could blame a group of interns for just getting dragged along for that ride.

      1. Anon4This*

        Oh, I should have added that no one got in trouble (though we do remind interns each year – and staff! – that pot is illegal on our premises). My understanding is that the board chair took it in stride.

      1. New Jack Karyn*

        I think that smoking indoors was the main issue. Bad form if cannabis was illegal where they were, but lighting up in a workplace is still bad manners.

    3. A. Ham*

      When I was a theater student at university there was a big celeb on campus giving a speech and getting an honorary degree (it wasn’t graduation… I think it was a new building dedication?) anyway, Celeb came to the theater after the event to give a little talk and Q&A with the theater kids which was awesome. We took a break half way through and a handful of us went out to the loading dock for a smoke break (tobacco).. and there is Celeb doing the same thing! so a small group of us got extra face time with them. They were super nice and cool and it was a great experience.
      I am really REALLY glad I am no longer a smoker, but I can’t say I regret being one at that particular point in my life…

    4. Blarg*

      That sounds like a regular Tuesday in all the theatres I’ve worked at. Except there also would have been so much alcohol.

  6. Blue Spoon*

    No wild intern stories here, so I will be watching intently. Best I’ve got is some unusual library and museum volunteers.

  7. Former Manager*

    We had an intern who had a penchant for wearing a bandeau style crop top with nothing underneath it except her very visible nipple piercings. It was a hot summer and a lot of outdoor work and for an 8 week long service term we didn’t have the heart to ask her to cover up but it was an interesting choice.

    1. LaurCha*

      Reminds me of my museum intern who showed up to unpack and install a large painting exhibition wearing low-rider jeans, a halter top, and platform flip-flops. (Why yes, it WAS the early oughts, how did you guess?).

    2. Dawn*

      I understand professional dress and all that, but I think if anyone is asking me to do a lot of hot outdoor work unpaid, they get what they get lol

  8. DisneyChannelThis*

    Worst intern I ever had was the guy who liked to nap in the hallways on his lunch break despite being told that was 100% unacceptable multiple times. I got chewed out by the director of the center (my boss’s boss’s boss) for “allowing it”. I got so sick of shaking him awake. In the beginning I was kind, asked if he had a medical issue and explained how to talk to HR, pointed out the optics issue, etc. Turns out he was just staying up till 3am playing video games. By the end of the summer I was just dropping stacks of books loudly next to him. Then I overheard him calling me a b****, and had to have the professional language at work discussion as well. It was a long summer.

    1. Lab Boss*

      We had a young (15 or 16 years old) summer camp counselor at our shotgun range who would constantly nap during instruction time, since he didn’t have to be actively instructing. His boss would rack an (empty) shotgun closed right next to his ear, which usually woke him quickly- or just lifted one end of his napping bench about an inch and then dropped it.

      1. Bruce*

        How did they nap through the shotgun blasts? I was an un-trained archery instructor running the archery range one summer all by myself, my buddy ran the shotgun range solo next door. The next to last day of camp he invited me over to try the shotguns, with no ear protection. BLAM!!! I was stunned. I stayed away from shotguns until I was a Scout father myself, then managed to actually hit one clay target one time, this time with ear muffs on. (reader, that Scout camp closed long ago, it was not doing well at the time and should have had trained adults running those ranges. The rifle range at least was well staffed)

        1. H3llifIknow*

          You can get used to almost anything. My son can (and has) sleep thru fireworks and marching bands, and my husband after a couple of weeks learned to sleep through SCUD missile attacks and the alarms that sounded during Desert Storm *shrug*.

          1. Songbird121*

            It’s called sensory adaptation in psychology. Once a stimulus becomes familiar and consistent most people’s brains just sort of filter it out to an extent as “not important to pay attention to.” This works for the majority of people, though it can vary based on what the stimuli is. It’s the same thing that makes people not like LED lights initially but then get used to them over time (mentioned in a different thread about interns working in the dark. Or on another thread entirely. I think I need to log off now. lol.) Additionally, those with sensory processing issues often have brains that don’t adapt as easily to sensory input and don’t filter it out as well, which can be part of the sensory process sensitivity. The things that many brains eventually filter out or “turn down” in awareness done get filtered.

        3. Lab Boss*

          He did have his earmuffs on- but yeah, as H3llifIknow says, you just kind of get used to it when you work there all day.

    2. Emily Byrd Starr*

      I work at a university, and I once had to work with a student who had a habit of falling asleep just before I was supposed to meet with him. I had the awkward task of having to wake him up.

    3. NotHannah*

      The intern I hired once for an art museum job had her own office space and could often be found sleeping there.

  9. karriegrace*

    My husband had an intern whose email address (that they put in their resume) was meatwad69@x.com. I don’t know that he was in any other way unusual or difficult, but the email is now part of their office lore.

    1. Juicebox Hero*

      The first thing that any career prep program really ought to be “use an anodyne email address in all business-related matters”.

      1. Siege*

        I covered it in my first day lectures for all my classes. It really is a part of professional norms that is less covered, and part of the problem is how common a lot of names are. My partner’s got practically the most generic name this side of John Smith; his job application email address ended up referencing a famous (unrelated) person with the same last name because every variant of his name and conventional birthdate info he could think of was already taken. You don’t really want to put an exact birthdate in a job-search email address, which limits the choices. Some discussion of ways to address this issue and why address it would be beneficial for people entering professional life.

        I, on the other hand, have a completely unique name but share initials with my father and brother, so I just have to be the most proactive about email clients of the three of us. :)

        1. Distracted Procrastinator*

          My name is about as common as Jane Smith, so I can’t have an email with my name on any large, open platform email service. I made up a “word” and use that for my email and a lot of user names. It’s generic and actually pronounceable because of how the letters are arranged. It works well.

          I have seen random internet people make blanket statements about how any email without your name in it is unprofessional, but it is a silly statement and doesn’t include those of us who absolutely can’t. (And no, it should not be expected for people with common names to buy domain names so they can have their name in their email for the occasional job hunt, as was suggested to me by multiple people who obviously don’t deal with having an extremely common name.)

      2. sparkle emoji*

        I’ve seen some doozies from people past the intern stage– ExtremeGamerName@blank, the “sexy” names, etc. But the worst was a resume with Illuminati art as the header and a 1911 Marxist political cartoon in the middle. And he was actually looking for a job when I contacted him, because I needed to know.

      3. Middle Aged Lady*

        I told all my student workers and summer interns this. Also, to change their voicemail message if necessary! One of my interns (the same one who asked if her boyfriend could hang around and watch her work, and had to be told no crop tops at work) had a voicemail message that greeted me with “yo, b***h what’s up?” I kept telling myself ‘they’re just kids: this is why we have internships so they learn.”

      4. Jake*

        When I was in college 15 years ago, we were instructed on this in at least 10 different classes. I still had classmates sending out emails to potential employers as chickmagnetXXX69@yaolmail.com type addresses.

        Sometimes you just can’t convince people.

    2. CowWhisperer*

      We had someone apply for a job at my work with the email “tokergirlcollege420@gmail.com”.

      The funny bit is that the job was for an alternative education teacher (e. g, a job that requires a great deal of setting boundaries and professionalism) and HR and various administrators had missed the email until I pointed it out. The principal literally trashed the resume.

      1. Elsewise*

        I worked at a college geared towards working adults and got an application once from someone whose email address was something along the lines of toker69420. He was applying for criminal justice. He told me he was interested in going into corrections, because he visited his brother in prison and “just felt like I belonged there, y’know?” I did not know.

        He never completed the application, now that I think of it. Maybe he found an easier way to get where he belonged.

      2. Ghee Buttersnaps*

        I was born in a particular year that I refuse to use in my gmail address, for this exact reason!

        1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

          It’s not a good idea to use your birth year in your email address anyway. You don’t necessarily want everyone you interact with, such as potential employers, knowing your age.

      5. Irish Teacher.*

        I read this originally as “token girl,” assuming it means she was the only girl in a mainly male programme and was wondering why that was such a problem!

    3. FricketyFrack*

      Well, Meatwad does make the money AND get the honeys, so I guess he was setting goals?

    4. Jen MaHRtini*

      Not an intern applicant, but I once received a resume from irideyou69allnite @ yahoo dot com.

      1. Claire Beauchamp Randall Frasier*

        I once worked in a school where one of the parent’s email addresses was ZippyGiggles @ gmail.com. I always wondered how I was supposed to take her seriously.

        1. Siege*

          A high school classmate’s mother’s name was Beverly. Of her own free choice, she went by Beaver.

          I might have been the most sheltered teen in the universe, but I still TO THIS DAY wonder how anyone, anyone at all, managed to take her seriously.

          1. H3llifIknow*

            Our HS mascot was a Beaver. We had posters and spirit buttons, etc.. with slogans like “Beavers Bite!” on them. I did not understand the jokes and mockery of our opposing teams and their fans until I was in my 20s. And I had never thought of myself as sheltered, but I guess in THAT regard I must’ve been!

            1. Dawn*

              A very famous hardware store/building supply chain here in Canada when I was growing up was Beaver Lumber, and let me tell you, I never got the jokes either.

              They got bought out in 2000 and it was frankly a very sad day.

              1. Elitist Semicolon*

                All those Molson’s Canadian ads about “Drink our beer while you’re out chasing beaver” and it’s an actual beaver running across the screen while a guy follows him on all fours.

                1. Dawn*

                  Fun story, Molson actually owned Beaver Lumber up until Home Hardware bought the company.

              2. Looking for a new name*

                Dawn, my ex worked at Beaver Lumber and I still have glasses with that logo on it.

              3. Bunny!*

                I live near a town called Beaver. For years they had a car wash called Beaver Bath. I never understood why no one changed it. Made me giggle every time I drove by.

            2. New Jack Karyn*

              I grew up in Oregon, which as you undoubtedly know, is the Beaver State.

              One of our chants at Pride was, “2-4-6-8, proud to be the beaver state!”

            3. Omnomnonymous Rex*

              Somewhat related, I went to high school in a tiny town named Flippin. I was such a sheltered teen, I didn’t realize until I was well into college why the rival town’s pep squad made banners that said things like “Let’s beat that Flippin team!”

              A college friend finally asked me why I kept swearing whenever I referred to things from my town. Like the Flippin school, the Flippin Walmart, the Flippin feed store. It finally dawned on me why everyone snickered when I did that.

            4. Reluctant Mezzo*

              Try being from Oregon State. I had to edit the newsletter for AFROTC which the colonel, with No Clue, had us name The Flying Beaver. I sure wasn’t going to be the one who told him what the problem was (since I was the second female ever going through the program).

            5. Beaverdale*

              There’s a neighborhood in Des Moines know as Beaverdale, which has (had? not sure if it’s still there) a dry cleaners called “Beaver Cleaners.” Very hilarious to the students at the nearby university.

          2. Theon, Theon, it rhymes with neon*

            I must be missing something. My mother’s nickname was Beaver because she lived in Beaverlodge, Alberta when she was young. If there was any reason not to use this name, nobody in my family knew about it. We only stopped when my 9-yo sister died, because she had especially gotten into it and enjoyed making Beaver references at every opportunity (Leave it to Beaver, any time there was a depiction of a beaver, etc., “Hey, Mom, it’s you!”), and my dad found it too depressing to be reminded of her in this way.

    5. fhqwhgads*

      Poor Matthew Ethan Atwad didn’t think things through. And shares a birthday with Donald Duck. ;)

    6. Admin of Sys*

      Heh – At my last university, you could choose your own account name as long as it wasn’t already used, and it was /super/ difficult to get your account name changed. To the point that folks getting divorced often wouldn’t bother updating theirs because of the paperwork, and that had a legal name change behind it. So students who had … not great judgement as undergrads, who then went on to work at the university got to (had to) keep their original account. After all, it was already in the system, no need to create a new account, and certainly no need to let them change it.
      There were quite a few reasonable and professional employees who had graduated from the school, who were stuck with logins like ‘ballwizard’ and ‘squeeky’ because they’d chosen them at 18.

      1. Dawn*

        I have to admit I’d actually be highly amused to be the person whom everyone had to call “ballwizard” because IT can’t be bothered to do one (1) thing.

      2. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

        One of the universities I attended also let students choose their own usernames, with the added bonus of not having a required character length. My username wasn’t cringey fortunately, but it was two letters and had nothing to do with my name. So my university email was something like az@uni(.)edu.

        Eventually someone in IT changed protocols when they migrated the system so students had to use the initial.surname@ that was issued when a student enrolled. Students who enrolled under the old system were allowed to keep their existing username if they wanted. There was a lot of people rushing to change all the 4206969xxx type usernames. I kept mine the way it was and was silently pleased whenever someone complained that they had a hard time looking up my email in the student directory.

        1. Orv*

          The worst part of initial.surname@ schemes is the collisions. Someone will always get the indignity of being initial.surname2@, and having their email constantly misdirected.

          1. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

            Another university I attended had a weird policy of the first person with a specific surname is just surname@ and everyone else has to be initialsurname@. So John Smith is the first and he gets smith@, then Jordan Smith starts and is jsmith@, then another John Smith shows up and is jsmith2@.

            To make it more annoying, they put a seven character limit on usernames and would not add extra letters that might be helpful in the case of someone having a name shorter than seven digits. So Jacinta Lee is lee@, Josiah Lee is jlee@, and Jessica Lee is jlee2@. My surname is exactly seven digits so when my spouse started working there, they got carlson@ and when I enrolled, I got to be acarlso@. The next person with the same initial and surname would be acarls1@.

            People with long or hyphenated names were very unhappy with this. And with a student body of over 10,000 with a heavily international student population, there were several students who wound up with unfortunate combos, like my classmate and their older sibling, who were sucker1@ and sucker2@ (surname Uckermann).

            1. Dawn*

              I can’t find it now but I remember seeing a news story where someone’s name was something like Wilhelmina Hore and she got the email address you’d expect and the school was utterly rigid about their first-initial-last-name scheme and wouldn’t change it.

          3. Smurfette*

            Yes. This is one of the few times I was happy to have a unique surname. It was difficult for other people to spell and pronounce, but I was never hsmith4@company.

      3. Your Mate in Oz*

        I had the joy once of being assigned an email address based on the name everyone called me. It did not meet the official requirements, but somehow the (very formal) person in charge of such things looked at the list of student names, saw my full legal name, and typed “ozmate@university” into the box. WTF?

        Even funnier was the head of department when I started postgrad taking me aside to say “I have never been able to find out how you got that email address, but you need to change it to match your legal name before you officially enrol as a postgrad”. You an me both, mate, you and me both.

    7. Dawn*

      I used to work for a government service that provided information to the public and the number of official information requests you’d get from someone who, even over the phone, would casually tell you their email was “sexymama69@” or whatever was remarkable. I could never, I’d die of shame.

      1. Bunch Harmon*

        As a teacher, I see those all the time. It’s even worse when I’ve had to have kids verify their parents email address. But sometimes it does explain some things!

    8. Orv*

      I work at a university, and you occasionally run into someone who clearly chose an email address when they were a freshman and then had to live with it when they eventually ended up working at the same institution as an adult.

      1. Stariel*

        I did that, but luckily I chose a reasonable email as a freshman. But I frequently had to explain why my email didn’t follow the usual firstname.lastname format.

    9. n.m.*

      Wonder if your intern is friends with my student who emailed me from malware_lkaghd at gmail dot com

  10. Lab Boss*

    One summer, we ordered some glass bottles that surprised us by coming with a plastic coating that had to be removed before they could be used with dry heat. We thought the intern was collecting all of the loose sticky plastic to throw it away- it wasn’t until the next day that she proudly showed us how she had pressed it all together into a wad, and then molded it into the shape of a marital aid. We have no idea why, or why she showed us, but she got offended when we threw it away.

      2. Lab Boss*

        I’m not 100% sure how strict Alison is on these matters in the comments- she essentially made a sex toy shaped like a very specific piece of male anatomy, out of scrap soft plastic from the lab.

      4. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

        Euphemism for sculpture of portion of male anatomy normally covered by clothing.

    3. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

      I was going to give her points for artistic cleverness right up to the word “marital.”

      1. Lab Boss*

        Oh nobody would have cared at all if she just made a sculpture out of it, it wouldn’t have cracked the top 5 weirdest things sitting around the lab.

        1. Ally McBeal*

          When I worked at a college I once had to take some photos of some classroom options we were contemplating for a training. I think we were in the reading/exam period, and that room wasn’t in regular use anymore… so I was very surprised to open the door and find a 5+ foot tall penis made of purple cardboard. I didn’t want to assume it was trash (maybe it was someone’s art project for a class?) so I just moved it for the sake of the pictures and closed the door behind me. I hope the janitorial staff got as good a chuckle out of it as I did.

          1. Jam on Toast*

            “The specific reproductive mechanisms used by dinosaurs is still a subject of some debate among paleontologists….”

        2. Quill*

          We save alarm for things that could corrode or explode, in most labs.

          Weird… well that’s highly context dependent, my workplace has a display of kidney stones and other similar organoliths and it’s definitely related to work.

      2. What_the_What*

        Well, I misread at first as “martial” aid and was like “She made a throwing star out of wadded up plastic? Cool.” Oops. Nope.

        1. Dawn*

          Terry Pratchett actually has a whole joke based on someone not clocking the difference between “marital” and “martial” haha

          1. H3llifIknow*

            I’ve also seen some hilarious riffs on people who don’t proofread when they MEAN to write “public” and accidentally write “pubic” and …nobody catches it.

            1. Dawn*

              “The University of Texas at Austin’s public affairs assistant dean has issued an apology after a commencement listing for the program’s forthcoming graduates contained a typo citing the Lyndon B. Johnson School of ‘Pubic’ Affairs.”

              Honestly, knowing LBJ, I feel like it’d have been more appropriate that way.

            2. Modesty Poncho*

              As a proofreader, whenever anything I edit has anything to do with the public, I run a search for “pubic” just in case XD

              1. Lab Snep*

                I worked at a newspaper and a headline that was supposed to be “Fun for the whole family” went through allll the proofreading as “Fun for the whore family”.

                It was a legitimate error, nobody did it on purpose.

                I thought it was HILARIOUS.

                The editor in chief did not.

            3. Wired Wolf*

              My company did that a few months ago on an intranet posting…nobody clued the author in and we had a pool going as to how long it would take someone to notice. Eventually the page (which had info on it that was actually needed) was just taken down.

              Another internal document typoed a brand name so that what was actually written translated (in a very common language in the area) to “fish penis”. Later the seafood manager found out that this typo had been made on the salesfloor signage as well. It wasn’t worth trying to get someone to reprint everything for the few days of the sale so everyone just rolled with it.

          2. linger*

            One of the Lancre books (“Lords and Ladies”?).
            King Verence sent off for a book on “marital arts”, not realising that all the mail would be opened by his guard Shawn, who was thrilled to find (as the king’s acute embarrassment, compounded by excited comments along the lines of “Wow, I didn’t think you could do it that way”, slowly turned to relief) … a book tailored to his own special interest in weaponry. It’s treated as a spelling error, though it’s possible Queen Magrat (who had many reasons to be careful with spelling) may have had a hand in proceedings.

            1. Dawn*

              Oh, yes, I remember the book, I could practically tell you the page number by memory, I just didn’t want to infodump on someone unnecessarily.

              1. allathian*

                On mine, too. I’m about halfway through and I’ve been stuck there for about two years now. I devour the Ankh-Morpork and wizards books, the rest are a bit hit and miss for me. I need to be in a particular frame of mind to enjoy the witches or Death.

                1. singular yike*

                  to be fair I think many of us need to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy death

                  (love Terry Pratchett)

                2. Dawn*

                  That’s funny, the witches are actually my favourite “series” next to Vimes.

                  I don’t care what anyone says, Nanny is the GOAT.

          3. Physics Lab Tech*

            oh i dont remember that joke! Oh well, guess it’s time to re-read discworld again! (as if i’ve finished lol)

  11. DisneyChannelThis*

    Best intern I ever had was a young woman who didn’t have the background needed for the role, I was really dreading supervising her. But to my surprise she was a highly motivated individual and she excelled at learning the role and got up to speed quickly. I’d suggest she look into XYZ and she’d come back the next day with what she’d read on it and follow up questions and then ask if there were other things she should read up on. She was a delight to train. I have no doubt she’ll go far in her career.

    1. Aww, coffee, no*

      I love this; I know the nature of AAM means mostly we hear horror stories, so it’s really nice to get a description of someone being awesome instead.

    2. Beth*

      Years ago, I was working in the costume shop of a major professional theatre company. We didn’t have interns per se; we had “overhire” people for some really major builds.

      One of them, one summer, was the most normal person I have ever met. She had no unusual hobbies, didn’t read, wasn’t a fan of anything unusual, apparently had no remarkable experiences. I have no idea what she was doing in a theatre job, even an underpaid short-term part-time summer job. Her very normality was fascinating, although she was incredibly dull to talk to.

      At the other extreme was the overhire person who claimed to have been the common-law wife of Andre the Giant. She was much more interesting to talk to, but I filed everything she said under “do not trust unless verified”.

      1. Siege*

        Yeah, I had a boss once who claimed to be in both a triad and a tong, had fought wildfires as a smokejumper, had gotten all his gang tattoos on his face including his blood drop removed, etc … it became very clear very quickly (and I was, as noted upthread the most sheltered person on earth) that absolutely nothing he said about his personal life could be relied on, and a lot of it was oneupsmanship of anything you said, even if it wasn’t about you. The firefighting thing came up when I mentioned that my brother was a wildlands firefighter at the time, for example.

          1. Siege*

            Normality, probably. The boring mundanity of being a maintenance department supervisor at a retirement home, perhaps.

        2. goddessoftransitory*

          I had a coworker like that: she’d casually mention stuff like she spoke fluent Chinese (she did not) and other bizarre things. It never had to do with work and she was a very nice, sweet person who fostered cats and did C/N/R with the local feral colony, so no one called her on it. And just like the “your brother was a firefighter? Me too” boss here, her stories usually came up in context of someone else’s achievement or similar.

        3. Ink*

          Hey, more entertaining than the kind of one-upper who needs to impress upon you at all times that they have The Saddest Life Ever, )Far Sadder Than Yours)!

        4. Chirpy*

          I had a teenage coworker once who claimed to be an expert on everything. He was like 17-18 and would interrupt me to tell customers (wrong) information, or take them all over the store looking for an item I’d already told them we didn’t carry. He didn’t even work in my department, let alone have my degree or experience.

          I believe he once said he’d been a professional rodeo rider for years, which…unlikely at 14. I also didn’t get the impression he actually knew anything at all about horses or cattle.

          1. Mysty*

            I had a coworker once who tended to adapt what people told her into her own life. A coworker was driving down to Disney World with his girlfriend? She was suddenly doing that with her boyfriend. Coworker complained that a guy was hitting on her while she served him? She suddenly had every single male customer hitting on her.

            She also lied to at least one coworker and said she was 24 when she was provably 19 and threatened to fight the pregnant store manager so. There was a lot going on there.

    3. Artemesia*

      My first research assistant was a grad student like that who was of enormous help to. me as I geared up to teach a grad class that was not really in my wheelhouse — so I was on a steep learning curve as well. It set me up for decades of disappointment as I never had another grad student that competent again.

  12. The Starsong Princess*

    We had an intern a few years ago who was smart and hardworking but had no concept of work place norms. He thought that work email was optional – he said he didn’t want to use it so could we just tell him or text him what he needed to know? So we explained to him that unfortunately, he had to use email. He also had a terrible handshake (wet fish fingertips) and didn’t know how to tie his tie. One of the guys set up some coaching sessions with him to work on these things including introducing himself and shaking hands with everyone in the department. He is now working full time and is successful.

    Our intern the following year was turbo charged. He felt he could run the department and I’m not sure he was wrong! He was a huge go getter but hated taking the bus to work. So he bought a scooter to use during his three month internship and sold it at the end for more money than he paid for it.

    3. Beth*

      A friend of mine is a high school teacher, and reports that Kids These Days don’t like email and don’t want to use it. I wonder what they’ll do when they get into the working world and are not given a choice.

      1. Managing While Female*

        As the manager of some of these young people, it’s frustrating, for sure. They have to be reminded over and over again to CHECK THEIR EMAIL. No, once a week is not enough. It’s not hard, people.

        1. LaurCha*

          I work in a law office. This is not exclusive to the young folk. I spend a lot of time calling and texting people to check their damn messages.

          1. Orv*

            My experience is people fall pretty cleanly into two groups: People who refuse to check their email, and people who ONLY check their email.

        2. Katie*

          My office has a true ticketing system that works lovely for client needs. However it cannot be used for any internal needs. However the head of our department is adamant that we shut down our email because we don’t need it anymore as all our client communication should be a ticket. Even though there is constant internal communication on it….

      2. Barefoot Librarian*

        To be completely honest here, my husband and I (both in our 40s) work in software (him as a senior dev and me as a communications/partnership director for a product) and we’ve both observed email usage going down rapidly. Even C-suite folk I work with regularly are in the habit of using Slack or Teams to send messages, tasks, and files. I went from getting 20-40 emails a day early career to getting maybe five that aren’t spam (and those are from customers). I have intercompany Teams and Slack channels set up with tech partners at other companies. I do think there will be jobs in just a few short years that never require you to use an email address, especially if you aren’t customer facing.

        1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

          I’ve found the same (work in a software type role – lead data scientist – in a non-software industry). Upwards of 90% of my emails are:

          * calendar invites or changes
          * automated notifications that someone has shared a doc with me, or mentioned me in a doc comment, or from something like Jira or github
          * spammy things from external software vendors

          There are maybe a few emails per week that are actually things I need to read – announcements of re-orgs or high-level leadership changes, new hire announcements, or once in a blue moon an actual question. We share docs vis SharePoint so there’s no emailing documents back and forth, and actual day-to-day communication is 95% on Slack. This has been a change even since I started at this company ~5 years ago. I’d imagine a lot depends on how much interaction you have outside the company – it’s precisely zero for me and anyone on my team or in a similar role, we’re not dealing with external customers or clients.

          1. Barefoot Librarian*

            You accurately describe the contents of my meager inbox, as well! And yeah, come to think of it, it has been in the last five years or so. The panorama and remote work accelerated the culture shift, I think.

        2. learnedthehardway*

          Here I was thinking it was just the phone messages going down. That’s fallen off very sharply in the past several years. Email’s down too, now that I think about it. I do a lot of messaging via social medial.

          I’m very seriously considering getting a separate mobile number just for texting people for work purposes, but I really do not want a second phone. Is it possible to have 2 numbers on 1 device?

          1. Kendall^2*

            If you’re in the US, you can get a Google Voice number that can forward to your phone (I text from my laptop for that account, since I don’t have a smart phone).

          2. ItsTooHotHere*

            there are dual-sim phones, with two simcards in them tmwhere each simcard has its own number

        3. Great Frogs of Literature*

          This has been my experience going from past!job to current!job, which I assumed was just the individual companies, but it doesn’t surprise me to hear that it’s a software company trend.

          1. Great Frogs of Literature*

            (My boss basically doesn’t check his email these days — he admits it and knows that it’s Not Great, but also he’s overloaded and email is one of the things he’s decided to drop. I keep an eye on the stuff I get, and if I think something’s slipping through the cracks, I’ll give him a heads up like, “Hey, there’s an email thread I think you should pay attention to, subject line is Gerbil Invoice 3017.”

            There are probably some other important things getting lost there, but he figures that if anything REALLY needs him, someone will Slack him about it, and he’s probably not wrong (at least for most of it), and I’m not his admin assistant, so…

            1. Barefoot Librarian*

              Same with my boss! He’s at the VP level and he’ll tell me to shoot him a Slack or text message if I notice an email thread he needs to pay attention to. He does check his inbox, but it’s super infrequent. (To be fair, he’ll do the same for me if there’s a thread I haven’t gotten to that might actually be important)

        4. Orv*

          I’ve always cynically assumed this is because they don’t want a paper trail. I’ve known people who used unofficial text messaging channels for that reason.

        5. allathian*

          Ticketing systems, Sharepoint, and Teams have made email largely unnecessary at work. Our intranet is on Sharepoint, and org-wide emails have been explicitly banned except in some emergencies. Maybe once a year we get an all-users email containing info that every employee needs. It’s also published on the intranet but many employees don’t check it as often as they should, at least once a day.

          I use my email mostly as a login to some company systems, and I get maybe a handful of actionable emails a month. I also use it when I travel on business and for things like booking hotel rooms.

          1. Suz*

            Our ticketing system has increased the number of emails I get. I get one every time a comment is added to a ticket and two if the comment comes from the customer.

        6. Expelliarmus*

          I work in software development, and most of my emails are either alerts about alarms going off (in the cloud) or meeting invites. Although sometimes when I’m first contacting someone in my company, I tend to use email, after which we move to IM for subsequent conversations.

          1. Expelliarmus*

            Oh, and it’s also useful for keeping track of code reviews done on GitHub pull requests!

      3. Tradd*

        Oh, yes! We’ve had candidates come for interviews who announced very early in the interview that they don’t do email. We send/receive large amounts of documents back and forth (international transportation). Email is how we communicate period. Teams is for internal stuff. Office jobs aren’t text based. I just don’t get it.

        1. Tradd*

          Email is for customers and I need a trail of everything I do. Much easier to search emails than Teams messages anyway

          1. Barefoot Librarian*

            Obviously it’s highly dependent on the field, but Teams (just as an example) is linked to SharePoint and it’s SO much easier to find files in SharePoint than in email. Plus you can organize everything by folders (so the team it’s associated with or the project). You can search by the person who owned the file, just things that were shared with you, file types, date, etc. When we share large files, we link to the location in SharePoint. I don’t know if I could go back to primarily, honestly.

            2. Tradd*

              I’m dealing with many different customers over the world. Frankly if there’s any preferred method of communication besides email, it’s WhatsApp!

              1. Barefoot Librarian*

                Whatsapp is great for international use! I have family overseas and use it to chat with them all the time. :)

      4. Quill*

        Probably for the same reason that my generation hates answering the phone and dealing with The (physical) Mail. It’s a means of communication that gives you a LOT of spam if you’re not careful / you are ever forced to use it for a lot of business, and it piles up easily.

        (But also: while you’re in school, even college, depending on how classes are set up, email can be completely optional and a thing you only use when you have to sign up for something.)

      5. MassMatt*

        I hear this a lot and am mystified. Supposedly people in their teens are the most digitally savvy ever and they don’t know how to or refuse to use email? Do they thinks it’s just too much hassle to open email? Is it not cool, something old people do?

        1. Dawn*

          Gen Z texts, almost exclusively, and a lot of them also communicate largely with voice clips within text messaging.

          They know how to use email, sure, but it’s very far from their preferred method of communication.

          1. Suzannah*

            The thing is, it’s not about an individual’s personal preference. What do they think a manager will do – individually text an entire department? And believe me, spam comes as texts as well.
            What I’m trying to get my head around is not the lack of affection for email ro whatever, bit the idea that someone who is an intern or new to the job thinks it’s an optional thing, if that’s how the company communicates.
            Until Gen Z owns or runs a company, they don’t make the rules. Was the same when my generation was new to the workforce.

        2. Managing While Female*

          I think it’s a matter of the tech changing. Email is an older form of technology.

        3. Irish Teacher.*

          They really aren’t as digitally savvy as people think. I think it’s partly that they are assumed to be extremely digitally savvy so nobody – teachers, lecturers, employers – thinks to teach them. And using computers for school or college or work is really very different from using them for fun.

          I have quite a few students (12-18 year olds) who are “digital natives” but have primarily used their smart phones and mostly for playing games, chatting and watching Youtube videos. A lot of them do not know how to save, how to create a file (or even the folders where it’s just “right click, create new, folder”) open a word document… And yeah, I would say the majority of our 1st years have no idea how to even access e-mail. Yeah, these are 12/13 year olds and one of our teachers has started teaching them – taking a 1st year class at a time and teaching it explicitly – but I can understand schools overlooking that, sicne this is “the most digital savvy generation ever” and you would be really surprised at what they don’t know.

          Of course, they vary a lot. I’ve also had students who at the same age could hack into the school’s accounts and stuff. But I would say the majority have major blind spots.

          It’s not about thinking it too much hassle or that it isn’t cool; it’s that they have never been taught because technology is changing so quickly and to most of us adults, e-mail is fairly new, so the idea that it’s not something most kids come across and actually quite different from how they use technology doesn’t tend to occur to us.

          1. Ellis Bell*

            They are the most digitally spoonfed generation; when I went to high school, in order to send an “instant” message it involved logging into a huge PC, waiting for dialup connection (!!), and using a keyboard. It was all worth it because there wasn’t a faster way, and you learned your way around office style systems because it was slow and you had plenty of time to figure things out. Now? Every amusement you could possibly think of appears instantly on a child’s touchscreen, and can be accessed with zero skill; yes I have some professional gamers and hackers as students but the vast majority get flummoxed putting in a password, or figuring out how to use the keyboard shift keys to get the @. Typing skills are genuinely a matter of practice too, and it’s practice they’re usually not getting.

        4. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

          It’s not something they had need to do or use for prior to working in an office environment, so like anything else it needs to be taught. It’s no longer used much if at all as a means of communicating socially (maybe people much older than me – I’m Xennial – still do?)

        5. Sneaky Squirrel*

          We assume younger generations know how to do everything that we know because they’re getting smartphones younger and younger, but that doesn’t directly translate to how to use a keyboard or how to navigate a windows desktop. Many teens are not as tech savvy as we think they are. Millennials and Gen X grew up alongside the technology and had the advantage of understanding the progress that went along with it, but younger generations came with it already “working”.

          As for email specifically, it may be as simple as that they tend to favor more direct forms of communication such as text, snapchat, teams, slack. Also less exposure to emails because schools probably favor more secure communications for student back and forth.

          1. Irish Teacher.*

            And now that I think of it, my generation (young Gen X or Xennial) weren’t expected to automatically know how to write formal letters or business letters just because we’d grown up writing thank you notes to our grandparents and letters to penpals and so on. We were still explicitly taught formal communication because it is different from more casual forms of communication.

            But the current generation are still in a weird limbo where schools are still teaching formal letter-writing (or at least were until recently, with also now teaching personal letter-writing because kids don’t know how to do that and I’ve even worked with some younger English teachers who had to look up the conventions of letter-writing before teaching them since…yeah, people in their 20s haven’t really had to write letters either) which isn’t much use and the normal forms of communication they use are more informal and again different from what they are expected to use formally.

            And I guess to us, e-mail was the easy technology because it wasn’t so different from letter-writing, so we forget that knowing how to do stuff like gaming doesn’t necessarily mean knowing how to format a business e-mail.

        6. Quill*

          People said that about my generation (Late Millennials) too and we still had a range between people programming computer games in their free time and people who couldn’t figure out how to open email attachments.

      6. LostCommenter*

        My brother is a lecturer for undergrad engineers and reports that they try to run their projects on their phones “which app should I use sir?” and look at him wide-eyed when he suggests using Excel. He’s so scared of them ruling the world.

      7. Somewhere in Texas*

        Probably one of those kids will invent the next thing to use as communication, but who knows what that could be!

      8. It's Marie - Not Maria*

        As HR for some of these younger people, not only do they not like using email, but when forced to use it, they TYPE EVERTHING IN CAPS. Literally everything. And then get mad when I coach them that all caps is perceived by many as yelling at the reader. IYKYK

      9. Bunch Harmon*

        As a high school teacher, can confirm. They don’t like, probably because they don’t know how to use it. When you insist that they send you an email, they put the entire email in the subject line.

    4. Artemesia*

      I have a niece who was raised by wolves (brilliant wolves, but wolves). So when she was about to get her PhD and was being introduced to big guns in the field and going to important conferences, one of her major professors took her in hand and gave her lessons on how to meet and greet, how to behave in a professional setting and what was appropriate to wear in such settings. She is very successful now but didn’t have any of the minimal social graces required even in a world where the bar is low of elite academia.

  13. comical*

    At a former job, people would always tell stories of a long-ago summer intern known only by the nickname “Spiderman”. In an effort to be deferential to his superiors, he would dramatically leap out of the way of anyone walking by in the office and press himself up against the wall, invoking the image of Spiderman sticking to walls with his superpowers.

    1. PABJ*

      Like actually suspended in the corner by holding himself up with his arms? That’s pretty impressive

    2. Reality.Bites*

      Not an intern, but I had a boss who’d been nicknamed Burgerman in college. His real surname was not unlike Burgerman, but he got the name from a late-night excursion for hamburgers during a snowstorm.

      It wasn’t just the name. It was also the chants of “Burgerman, Burgerman, does whatever a burger can.”

      1. Ellis Bell*

        It would make such a great introduction to the main character in a movie. You’d instantly be rooting for them to overcome it, take on everyone and win a massively unrealistic promotion.

    5. fhqwhgads*

      Ha! I knew someone – not an intern – whose nickname was literally spiderman. But they didn’t do that sort of thing, at least not at work. It was a longstanding nickname from their life in general.

    6. The OG Sleepless*

      I worked with a guy who would do that. Bonus points if he flattened himself inside a doorway, so that he was actually partially blocking your path in his efforts to get out of the way.

  14. NothingIsLittle*

    I was the intern!

    I have fatigue issues due to an autoimmune disorder (not yet diagnosed at the time) so I would sleep for my lunch hour. But my boss told me I couldn’t sleep at my desk. Since half the desks were unoccupied, I took a blanket and pillow and set up under one of the desks with some cardboard propped against it to block view of me and a note that said what time I would be done.

    Most of my coworkers were deeply amused and, since my mom worked in a different dept at the same agency, they would tell the story of me sleeping under desks any time they asked after my wellness.

    1. NothingIsLittle*

      Being entirely fair, I have found a nap spot at every job I’ve ever worked (one job had what amounted to nap rooms, living the dream), but at least now I know to explain it!

          1. NotJane*

            My husband works remotely and takes a 15-20 minute nap every afternoon and I am so jealous!

          2. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

            This is the main thing I miss about my old hybrid schedule. A 20 minute nap can make a HUGE difference in how much I can get done in a day, but there’s no way for me to get one in the office.

          3. allathian*

            Yes, and it’s the main reason why I resist going to the office more than once a week. There’s been no pressure so far to go more often, thankfully. On in-office days I generally take a nap when I get home, but if I leave it too late it’ll affect my sleep. Last time we had an offsite I went to bed at 8 pm and slept through the night (until 4 am).

          4. MA Dad*

            I’ve never understood short naps like that. Do you actually fall asleep or just try to zone out for a while? It takes me way longer than 20 min to fall asleep no matter how tired I am and I am a very heavy sleeper once I am out.

        3. ragazza*

          Agree! I don’t understand why companies think it’s better for employees to be useless for two hours trying to work through mental fatigue when they could take a 20-minute nap and feel refreshed for the rest of the afternoon.

        4. Admin of Sys*

          yes! One of the nice things about working on college campuses is there’s usually a couch stashed /somewhere/. But at previous jobs, I’d have to go out to my car, and that just doesn’t work in the summertime.

          1. Bunch Harmon*

            I have also been tempted by similar couches, but I remind myself “babies have likely been made here” and I move on.

          2. Berkeleyfarm*

            I knew were all the nap rooms were at my university, to be sure. (I had awful cramps.)

            The public building I used to work in had a little room off the Ladies’.

      2. Abogado Avocado*

        My husband works at a place with nap rooms. Apparently, all you need to do is book one for 30 minutes and take a nap. I am beyond jealous!

      3. FlynnProvenza*

        When I was carrying my “geriatric pregnancy” I was so tired that my boss (CEO) could see I was faltering. She told me to extend my lunch to 90 minutes to have time to drive home and sleep for an hour. (I lived about 10 minutes away). It was a godsend. That was years ago but I still take “car naps” at lunch when needed and the weather isn’t too hot. For I time I had a sleeping bag under my desk. I’d close my office door and put a post-it saying “lunch nap” on the door for an hour. Coworkers did not mind as it made me much nicer in the afternoon!

    2. Elsewise*

      When I was in college, I managed a student fundraising call center. A few times my senior year I let myself into the room when it was empty to nap under the desk. This stopped abruptly when some of the staff tried to use it as a meeting room and got startled by a bleary college student crawling out from under the table just as they were arriving. I found a different place to nap after that.

      1. Quill*

        My friends were lab / teaching assistants, I was a ball of stress, I was definitely let into the chemistry department’s instrumentation room when I should not have been SEVERAL times so I could attempt to be unconscious on the couch.

        (They had a couch in there! Not detectably contaminated with chemicals! They had to know it was inevitable.)

    3. BW*

      When my office went from cubicles with high walls to an open plan, there was no privacy for phone calls. So the office built “phone rooms” with a small window to the hallway, a small table and chair and phone, and long padded bench along one wall. We used to call them nap rooms, because you could make them dark, lay on the padded bench, and take a snooze. I used to push the chair up against the door, so that I would be alerted if anyone tried to enter. You really couldn’t see in through the window, especially if the lights were out. I took a nap every lunchtime, but I used the nap rooms on a different floor than the one I worked on, just to avoid my co-irkers.

    5. Ghee Buttersnaps*

      My dad worked at NASA for many years, and every day at lunch time, he would tip his chair back at his desk in an office shared with two other engineers, and take a snooze! And he is a snorer.

      1. I Have RBF*

        My boss at my last university job would zonk out at his desk, in an open plan, every afternoon. The conference rooms were all fishbowls, so there was literally no place private to go for a siesta.

      2. Artemesia*

        My Dad worked for NASA (well for a contractor on the moon shot) and one week 3 different engineers ended up on the floor because they tipped their chairs back and the chairs broke off at the stem and dumped them on their heads. Metal fatigue and the same type and age of chairs. NOW I know what actually happened to fatigue those chairs.

    6. womp*

      I have a very similar story. As a summer intern, I had an undiagnosed sleeping disorder (idiopathic hypersomnia). I would sneak off and take short naps in a convenient private room that I now realize was intended for breastmilk pumping. I don’t *think* I took time in the room away from anyone who truly needed it, but I am not sure about that! (cringe)

    7. LostCommenter*

      I suffered from fatique issues for close to a decade before being diagnosed. At my first ever job I interned in a factory and I was forced to stay an hour and a half after everyone I worked with left for the day. The second shift people didn’t want to deal with giving me work for that little time so I didn’t know what to do with myself. I found a nice loud refrigeration unit and I would shimmy in behind it (I was a scrawny underweight little girl) and nap in the heat for that time. People just assumed that since I wasn’t in the break room or workshop I was working somewhere in the plant.

      It was such a safety risk as no one would find me for days maybe weeks if something happened to me, but I just appreciated the nap time after 8 hours on my feet.

      1. Gullible Vengeance Umpires*

        This just knocked loose a memory.. I worked in the dining hall laundry room (think: rags aprons) one day a week in college and would hide behind the industrial dryer to nap, holding a rag in case anyone came in and caught me (it did happen, and I acted like I was cleaning back there).

    8. Orv*

      I used to sleep in my car during my lunch break. Now I have a private office, so I keep a hiking-style sleeping pad rolled up in the corner.

  15. wondermint*

    This one is more sweet than weird. I was the intern.

    The first week into my summer internship, I learned that I shared the same birthday with the CEO. I found out because there was a celebration on our birthdays complete with cupcakes and some beer/wine. I was working on a project so after I made an appearance I quietly went back to my desk to continue. (Intern me thought, best to show that I’m a hard worker!)

    The person managing me came over to my desk, we were the only two people in the room as everyone else was in a conference room down the hall. He had a cupcake lit with a candle and said something along the lines of, “I know it’s also your day, but I don’t blame you for being quiet about it.” I blew out the candle, ate my cupcake, and continued working. I imagine my bday was on a file somewhere and he remembered it, maybe because it was also the CEO’s? Anyway, it was really sweet and I won’t forget it.

  16. M*

    Best ever intern was at a publishing company. She re-alphabetized multiple bookshelves (hundreds of books) by AUTHOR FIRST NAME. Every time I looked at it I started laughing.

      1. Ally McBeal*

        At least she didn’t organize them by color? That trend drives me absolutely batty. My system is more like a library – organized first by book type (fantasy, nonfiction, etc.) then more or less by author.

        1. Rainy*

          You know that you can buy books for that kind of bookshelf in bulk in specific color gradations or transitions on Etsy and such?

          The people who do this don’t actually see their books as books (I’m convinced most of them can’t actually read), they’re just a decor element, and they buy them that way. Mystifying.

          1. Shiny Penny*

            Once I invited a new acquaintance over for a visit. As soon as she saw my bookshelf-lined hallway she started sort of waving her hands like she was warding off the devil, and saying “No! Oh, nooooooooo! Too many books!!!”
            I was flummoxed but trying to be polite, and explained they were actually just some of my favorite books? Like, no big deal? There’s more in the living room?
            She repeatedly assured me that the local Salvation Army accepts book donations, and I could just box them up and drop them off there, and she’d be happy to help me clear them all out. So I guess for her, books were not suitable decor items regardless of hue?
            Still makes me laugh!

            1. fhqwhgads*

              What the what.
              I still remember some demographic questions that were at the beginning of some standardized test I took in elementary school. Along with the usual demographic type questions, it asked how many books I personally owned, and how many books were in my home total. I remember being PERPLEXED by the multiple choice options, which topped out at “More than 100”. There must’ve been some government funding or study going on cross-referencing test scores to books in the home, but the options were like 0, 1-15, 16-30, 31-50, 50-100, more than 100. My little kid brain understood how some people might have no books or very few books but still thought that scale was mystifying, especially because it was the same for both questions. I realize now I’m reflecting a lot of privilege but at the time I was like “100 books is one half height bookshelf, that’s nothing?”

              1. Rainy*

                My baby sister had a little friend in grade one and we went to pick her up from playing at the little friend’s house one day. We were invited in, my mom made polite conversation for a few minutes and extended an invite for LF to come over to our house to play, we were shown LF’s bedroom, the usual.

                When we got to the car, my mom said “Huh. Well, now I understand why she needed magazines from us for that assignment the other day.” Mom and I sat in silence on the way home, just contemplating what we’d seen.

                They owned a Bible. From what we could see, that was it. There were no magazines in the living room, no books anywhere that we could see, no art on the walls (almost nothing on the walls, honestly), and LF’s room (which she wanted us to see of course) didn’t have a bookshelf or a pile of books on the nightstand. A bookless home.

                1. Your Mate in Oz*

                  When my cousin got married I somehow ended up visiting my new cousin-inlaw’s parent’s house. There were NO BOOKS. They had a ~5 year old kid, and not even any kids books. My family has lots of teachers (some even specialise in teaching remedial reading to kids just starting school). So obviously once I revealed this terrible family secret there was much discussion and planning done. That kid got books for every birthday and xmas from everyone for years afterwards.

                  The worst part was that somehow the CiL found out that I was implicated, so the CiL bailed me up at an event and demanded to know what I’d said and why everyone had reacted that way. It’s really hard to explain politely that we think they were brought up in a deprived environment to the point where it’s arguably abusive.

                  My parents have downsized now they’ve retired and I think only have one room full of books. The other rooms are not “full of books”. That’s a win!

              2. Irish Teacher.*

                I don’t think my little kid brain would have been able to grasp the idea of an entire family having less than 100 books. I would have thought like 20 books per person to be about the lowest a person could have.

                And yeah, probably somewhat privileged (although I grew up on pretty much the lowest income level possible in 1980s Ireland).

              3. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

                Unless they also asked about using the library just ASKING that question has a lot of privilege baked in! When I was a kid I was an absolutely voracious reader, but we couldn’t afford to buy many books and certainly not enough to support my reading rate – when I was in elementary school I certainly personally owned far less than 100 books, but I’d gotten the librarians to give me special permission to take out more than the usual limit for kids of 20 books at a time, so I’d check out 40 books every time my mom took me to the library (every few weeks).

                1. Magc*

                  When my youngest was in first grade, I volunteered at a Scholastic books event where each kid got 1 or 2 free books (most students at the school fell into the “disadvantaged” category). I learned what the principal meant by our household being one with resources when one of the kids waiting their turn to pick out books told me excitedly that after this he would have FIVE BOOKS!!

                  Our kids both had more than that before they were even born…

                2. sparkle emoji*

                  Yeah, I could bike to the library as a kid so I went frequently. I knew it was time to leave when I couldn’t fit anymore books in my arms, and I usually had to use my chin to keep myself from dropping them.

                3. Rainy*

                  When I was a kid my folks would take me to the library once or twice a month in the summers. I would fill a paper grocery bag with books, and read them all at least twice before the next trip. I started reading way above my grade level at a very early age because my parents couldn’t afford to buy me all the books it would have taken to keep me occupied but they had a lot of books (we’re a reading family–my parents both had science careers but I did Classics and my sister did English lit and composition) so I started reading their books.

                4. Your Mate in Oz*

                  I was “that kid” at the local library. I don’t think they had limits on the number of books you could have at a time, but if so they almost certainly didn’t apply to me. I’d strap a cardboard box to my bicycle and fill it with books then ride down and exchange it for another boxload of books. At least once a week.

                  I was also made to read every single book in the kids/YA section before I was allowed to borrow adult books. In retrospect that was because I still completed said task before I was 12. I didn’t get a job at the library until I was 15, though.

                5. Ally McBeal*

                  My parents had multiple full-to-bursting bookshelves, and my dad took me to the library every single Saturday to fill up a tote bag (we’re talking Tetris – the tote was packed tight). At one point a new librarian asked my dad if I was really reading all those books every week – he replied that I usually had them all finished by Sunday evening. I’m glad they didn’t have any sort of official limit.

                6. Dog momma*

                  also a voracious reader.Limited to 12 books at a time from our local library, kids section. I did this every Saturday for years. When I got through all of the ones that interested me, I started over. Must have read the Little House & Lad: a Dog series 5 times.
                  Very introverted, chaotic household. My father & his mom were verbally abusive, so this was a great escape for me.
                  I still love to read!

              4. 40 Years In the Hole*

                Heh. Hubby has, at last count, over 5000 – yes, 5000 books and still counting. He’s a military historian so there’s the research aspect. Now it’s, I’m sure, out of spite when I suggest there may be enough?
                Got to the point I bought him an app to scan and catalog them, at least to reduce the duplicates and myriad crumpled sticky notes in his pockets (they don’t hold up well in the wash).

                1. 40 Years In the Hole*

                  And yes, they are organized by subject/author/battle/century/armed services etc.

                2. It's Marie - Not Maria*

                  I am also a Military Historian, married to an Archaeologist. Our bookshelves are organized by Subject/Time Period/Author. We probably have close to that number on our Library – yes, we have an actual Library.

                3. Kendall^2*

                  I really like LibraryThing (dot com) as a place to have my library catalog (and see others’, and talk about books with folks, etc).

              5. General von Klinkerhoffen*

                I’m pretty sure there are a hundred books in our “to donate” pile, and I’ve just had an automatic reminder from the library that YoungestChild’s 19 books are due at the weekend. So I’m definitely in the “couldn’t survive with under a hundred books” camp.

                But from a survey point of view I understand the question. Once a household has a hundred books, that’s a household that clearly doesn’t need targeting with literacy programs. 50-100 households also enjoy books but probably wouldn’t put reading in their list of hobbies in a bio, and would probably just benefit from being reminded about the library. The categories below that then maybe give you the strata of how much support or intervention you ought to be running – and a significant proportion of 0/1-15 type replies would probably qualify a school for targeted library funding.

              6. UKDancer*

                We had a discussion about different types of privilege at work and there was a questionnaire. One of the questions was whether you had more than 50 books in the house growing up.

                We had many more than that in each of the bedrooms and more in the lounge. I never thought that was a privilege before it was just normal to me. So the discussion was eye opening.

              7. Katie*

                My daughter loves reading. In the 4th grade, their only homework was to read 15 minutes a night. However they logged their time and the person who read the most each month. My daughter always won, except the month she lost her log. We just put 15 min. a night on the replacement. She got 3rd place that month.

                1. Lenora Rose*

                  Marie Kondo doesn’t demand people get rid of things that spark joy; she’d just have suggestions for how to organize the bookshelves. She got rid of a lot of her *own* books but that doesn’t apply across the board.

                2. No MK libel shall go unchallenged*

                  Marie Kondo would absolutely support you having as many books as you want.

              2. Rainy*

                I know it’s possible because I saw that episode of Hoarders (0510 “Claire and Vance”), but just having a book-lined hallway does not meet that standard at all.

              3. Irish Teacher.*

                There are people – my gran was one – who cannot conceive of reading a book more than once. She repeatedly asked me if I just threw my books away once I’d read them. So I guess this person assumed Shiny Penny didn’t know what to do with her books once she’d read them and needed help getting rid of them. Like they were empty boxes of eaten food or something.

                1. Cathie from Canada*

                  In the past, the only books I kept were ones that I knew I likely would want to re-read — when I finished a book I knew I wouldn’t want to read again, I would give it away or trade it in to the second hand bookstore. But I still accumulated hundreds of books over the years. But ever since I started using Kindle, I was able to downsize my library quite a bit — most of my favorite books and book series are on my Kindle now. Also, I loved finding the Libby app, so I can also borrow Kindle books without having to buy them on Amazon.
                  What I like best about Kindle is being able to resize the typeface and typestyle so I can read even though my eyesight is poorer. I also love being able to read at night without disturbing my husband by keeping the bedside light on.
                  That said, however, I still do have a number of my older hardcovers and paperbacks, because publishers often won’t bother to bring out electronic versions of older books. So I still have my paperbacks of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents short stories, my old science fiction, old novels, poetry, history books, comedy books, art books, etc.

            3. Rainy*

              I am…uh…well, that acquaintance wouldn’t make the standards for conversion to friend for me, that’s for sure.

              What the heck. Who does that.

            4. Dawn*

              “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t f— them.” – John Waters

            5. Quinalla*

              Haha, that is too funny. My husband complains my bookshelf has too many books sometimes, I’m like hey at least it isn’t double stacked (row of books in front of another row of books) anymore! Though I have no problem with folks doing that, it is hard to see the books in the back, but sometimes there isn’t enough bookshelf space.

              I have most of my library on my kindle now and keep only one bookshelf full for me as sometimes I just want to read it in paper form and whatever books the kids want in paper.

              1. Kendall^2*

                I do have some double stacked…. but the front books aren’t spine-front, but spine-up, so I can see enough of the books behind to identify/find them. It only works with shelves that are deep enough for that, obv., and I only put the regular format paperbacks in the front.

            7. Sister George Michael*

              Same! A work colleague visited my apartment and told me, “this looks like a bookstore.” Then added (unnecessarily!), “I didn’t mean that as a compliment.” Dear Reader, she was not invited back.

            8. goddessoftransitory*

              I remember seeing one of those “decorate your living room” articles where they said that such and such a percentage of your bookshelf needs to be dedicated to decorations of some sort and I was all what? No! Books go in that space. It is a BOOKSHELF.

            9. Ellis Bell*

              This reminds me of oft quoted “She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.” Maybe she took that literally?

            10. Barefoot Cowgirl*

              I had a friend once comment that she’d never seen anyone decorate with books before. It took me a minute to figure out what she was talking about, because I don’t decorate anything, they were just the books I had in the living room. She had four little kids, and no visible books in her home. But she had decorated her home beautifully…

              1. BooksBooksBooks*

                Same here! I had a full wall full of bookshelves (and will again; we’re moving shortly) and everyone who sees them is speechless. Then they say something about wow, you really like to read, huh? And generally change the subject and leave the room.

                Very few people appreciate the sight, somehow.

            11. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

              @Shiny Penny that sounds a lot like my French-born grandmother. She felt books were pretentious. My dad actually grew up hiding that he liked to read, because she had such a negative attitude about it.

            12. BooksBooksBooks*

              Wow. All my books are currently in storage and it’s painful. I can’t imagine never having books around.

          2. goddessoftransitory*

            I saw an article in the paper about a business that buys up about to be pulped books strictly by cover color and sells them for this decorating theme, by the yard.

            By. The. Yard. Reminds me of old Dorothy Parker stories where you knew her character was a dicksmack because they bought leatherbound books by the yard for their fancy library (never cracked one once, naturally.)

            1. Frieda*

              I knew a family growing up that built a library addition to their home and then had to buy books by the yard for it since they weren’t really readers.

              To be fair I think part of the work that they had done was raising a section of the roof to permit a larger Christmas tree, so maybe the library section was just an architectural bonus.

              The oldest daughter went on to write a book, as an adult, that was a memoir about how weird her family was, so there’s that.

          3. Colour Coded Librarian*

            As a librarian, I disagree with your comment. I have spent time organizing my books by colour because it’s fun, it looks lovely and I find that the time spent looking at my books, is time well spent. I also recognize my books by sight. A colleague of mine organizes her books by whether or not the characters of the books would get along with each other. Life needs more whimsy and beauty.

        2. Constance Lloyd*

          Sooo I kind of organize by color in my personal library. Shelves are sorted with my favorite books closest to the top and books I’ve enjoyed but did not love in that intense, feral way near the bottom. From there, each shelf is a rainbow gradient. I know which books I love best and I know which color they are, so they’re very easy to find!

          1. Ophelia*

            Like all people with too many books and not enough storage, I organize them as god intended: by height, so I can cram extra shelves into the bookcase ;)

            1. Lenora Rose*

              My favourite bookcases had shelves that were a good height for anything but the art books, so I arranged them with the hardcovers at the sides and the paperbacks in the middle because there was less risk of sag that way (And otherwise wherever possible by author then series), but I also have other bookshelves with variable heights, and I was *deeply* annoyed when I had a book by a given author that wouldn’t fit on the same shelf as their other books.

            2. allathian*

              Yes, this!

              Before I met my husband, my books were organized by genre and author/series, but when we consolidated our libraries, it became a mix of genre/author/size. Most of one wall is non-fiction (military history for my husband, popular science for both of us, biographies mainly for me) and the rest is fiction, mainly sci-fi, fantasy, and crime for both of us, horror for him and classics for women/girls (L.M. Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jane Austen…) for me. Modern literary fiction of the type that Alison usually recommends is almost completely absent from our shelves, though.

              My husband and I are voracious readers and our son is also a reader. Most of his birthday and Christmas presents are books.

              We have a movie room/library with floor to ceiling bookshelves on two walls, and our son has one wall in his room. My husband and I own something like 3k books, and our son has about 300, although we’ve given away most of his baby and picture books.

              He’s currently reading LotR in English, and he’s also read it in Finnish and Swedish.

          2. fine-tipped pen aficionado*

            The only wrong way to organize your own personal books is a way that doesn’t work for you. Don’t let the haters get you down!!! ROYGBIV your heart out!!!!

            Personally, I don’t organize my books at all.

            1. LostCommenter*

              And I’m on the opposite scale. My books are organised by Fiction/non fiction, genre, writer, order of sequence in the series, and colour as well as a “I need to read this again soon” section. It works for me, I can put my hand on a specific book in seconds, but also if you remove a book, you better put it back in the right place or face death.

              1. Constance Lloyd*

                Okay I *used* to be this detailed (or, close to it), but the compulsion to keep it perfect was ruining my enjoyment of the books so I overcorrected. As an accidental bonus, when loan-worthy friends want to skim my shelves for books to borrow, they can tell how much I loved a book and ask for details why! It also means Oryx and Crake shares a shelf with Inkheart and Catherine Called Birdy… which feels both strange and oddly fitting. It also means Paulo Coelho has a book on every shelf.

        3. I don't work in this van*

          I have my work-oriented books organized by color because that’s how they stick in my mind, I think because they’re all vaguely related. So like, I know that the good example of a llama audit is in the greenish book with red text, but I could not tell you the name of the book or who wrote it.

          1. Jackalope*

            I had a housemate once when I was living overseas who told me that my book organization system was wrong. I had my books organized by author’s last name, but she said I should use the size of the books instead because they were easier to shelve. I was horrified at first, but when I looked at her books (almost all in the local language), I realized that her country sized their books based on what kind of book it was, so size organization meant all of the similar types of books were together. (She didn’t have so many books that she needed more organization than that.) I never took her suggestion but I could at least see why it made sense to her.

            1. Chirpy*

              I have mine organized by size, but that’s mostly so you can stack more books on top of the row of books without smashing anything sticking up.

        4. kiwiii*

          I have been working to reexpand my personal library after doing a deep cut post-college and then being too burnt out to read for several years — as such, and because I utilize Libby/ebooks as frequently as not, my TBRs greatly out number my books I’ve read and am keeping.

          My read books are organized in the same way as yours, but my TBRs … color all the way!

        5. Sharpie*

          My fiction are mostly series and in series order, with no particular attention paid to author name (mostly because I was doing my best to get each series on one shelf). Non-fiction are on topic order within the subject – there’s no point using the Dewey decimal system because I’ve got two entire bookcases on the Napoleonic Wars, one on the land-based stuff, one on all the aspects of the Naval stuff. (If anyone here thinks you know me from anywhere else on the internet, now you know where from. Probably.)

        7. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

          Hah, I work in a library as a cataloger, and my books in my library at home are organized by color* because I find it soothing. I already spend my days putting books in call number order, so it’s nice to have something different at home. Also, doing some approximation of call number order would drive me insane because I’d want it to be perfect.

          *Exceptions being books that are part of a series, and books by my 4 favorite authors. Those all have their own shelves opposite the wall of color-arranged books, and are arranged chronologically.

        8. Blarg*

          I organize by color. Even the apps on my phone are in folders by color. That is how I remember things. Everyone is different. I don’t get shaming how people organize their own stuff.

      2. Reality.Bites*

        There was an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show where Mary hired an assistant because she’d gotten her fired from her previous job. She filed everything that started with “The” under T.

        1. Chocolate Teapot*

          And in Are You Being Served? one of Mr Rumbold’s secretaries files everything under A. (a letter, a file…)

          1. Abogado Avocado*

            OMG, this reminds me of a former law office manager whose Rolodex (look it up, kids) was organized similarly. All attorneys were under A (because they were attorneys), even the District Attorney and the Solicitor General.

            2. Really?*

              My father worked this way; doctors and dentists were under “d,” because he couldn’t remember names, and put their information where he’d find it. Must admit I do the same thing; my hair stylist is under “H.”

              1. Dawn*

                Sometimes I actually do this in my phone contacts and save someone as like “Superintendent Phil” or “Doctor Smith” – it’s my personal contacts and whatever is going to work for me best is the system I’m using.

                1. Janne*

                  And then an important person gets A, AA or AAA in front of their name. That’s why I have a contact “AAA GP Emergency Number” in my phone.

            3. Generic Username*

              I am related to a priest who had every other priest in their diocese in his iPhone’s Contacts app list under F (as in F for Father….)

          2. What the what*

            I was the intern and I wasn’t the weird one. 30 years ago, I interviewed with someone for an internship after hours in their office (I was very naive). The man vigorously fondled himself through his clothes the entire time! I wasn’t sure that what I was seeing was actually what was happening. (I remember asking myself: Was he just adjusting himself? Maybe a horrible skin condition? The itch you can’t tell your doctor about?)

            After the “interview” I immediately contacted the internship director to tell him what happened. He contacted the police for me and I had to be interviewed by the police about it. Apparently, the police were already aware of that he’d done it to others.

            The man was actually disbarred years later. I read the state bar disciplinary report many years later and he had indeed done this—among other things—to other women. I do think it was a situation born not of control or power, but a legit situation of someone in extreme mental distress, dealing with overwhelming compulsions and a life that had veered drastically out of control. I do feel compassion for him; I’m not excusing his behavior, but it’s sad to see someone fall so far from their bad choices and illness.

            Oddly enough, that experience didn’t make me a man hater. It know it was just one guy making bad choices and I just happened to win that creepy lottery that day. It DID teach me to trust my gut, follow my instincts and be aware of my surroundings.

            1. Ellis Bell*

              “the police were already aware of that he’d done it to others” !!?? Goodness me, what does it take?

        4. The Gollux, Not a Mere Device*

          One of Gary Larson’s _Far Side_ collections has an index in which every item is indexed under T, for “The One About…”

          1. goddessoftransitory*

            I love his “Hell’s Library” where every book on the shelves is story problems.

            1. Magc*

              Every book being full of story problems would have been heaven for me, and it’s probably not a surprise to hear that I’m a programmer (AKA software engineer developer — yes, I _am_ old!).

              Well, maybe not a perfect heaven, as I’ve read (and own) an awful lot of sci-fi and fantasy novels…

        5. Admin of Sys*

          We had an intern long ago that filed things in nested categories. So ‘kitten’ got put under C because cat starts with C and a kitten is a Cat. The concept of their taxonomy was fascinating, but it made tracking down files nearly impossible.

          1. ViridianGreen*

            I feel like that sort of association thing works very well with a tagging system where you can slap on anything that might be relevant, and *not at all* for files.

        6. Jonathan MacKay*

          I wasn’t an intern, but I caught myself doing exactly that when filing stuff at my current job. It was at least the start of the month, so didn’t take that long to fix, and as far as I know, no one noticed… but oy, did I feel sheepish…

        7. Lenora Rose*

          My phone does that with the music files. So when I went through the songs in alphabetical order, I had a micro-alphabet sequence in the middle of the Ts.

          (Fortunately, this was not irksome because the point was just to go through everything once without repeats, not about the specific sequence.)

        1. Quill*

          I can feel the lidless glare of my high school library’s mascot betta fish, Dewey 3.0, judging the idea that you file by anything other than what is literally written on the shelves.

      2. Former page*

        In high school I was a page in the children’s room. The fiction was generally shelved by reading level but there was a separate set of bookshelves for “mysteries” which spanned all levels, easy reader to YA. They had a special ‘sherlock holmes’ sticker on the binding.

        I came to my shift one day to discover that the other, newer page (also a high school student) had independently decided to pull all the mystery books and reintegrate them into the general reading level collections. She left me a little post-it to say she was only half done.

        The children’s librarian (who hadn’t been present to see this happen) immediately had me drop everything to go re-find all the mysteries and put them back. I was super mad because I’d been working on a fun side project and didn’t want to clean up this other girl’s mess.

        2. 1LFTW*

          My library had the Sherlock Holmes sticker too! I haven’t thought about that in years.

    4. BW*

      My husband received a professional journal recently that had lists of names alphabetized by first name. Apparently, they moved the printing of the journal to China, and last names come first there, so . . . And nobody in the USA proofread that part.

      1. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

        I just read a book where the bibliography was alphabetized by first name. Really annoying.

    5. Aww, coffee, no*

      Confession – while my books are shelved by genre, then author last name, my music DVDs are all organised by artist first name.
      For some reason I used to be dreadful at remembering artist last names, and thus would struggle finding the albums I was looking for in music shops. At the point I had enough CD’s to need to organise them I decided they were jolly well going to be alphabetical by first name.

      1. Not your trauma bucket*

        Don’t let anyone else tell you how to organize your things! You do what works for you in your own house. I’ve organized books by color before because I usually remember the cover color and that’s easier to narrow down than browsing names on spines. Other things I have near each other because they’re roughly related in ways that only make sense to me. But I’m the one who needs to find them, so that’s where they go.

      2. Brunch with Penguins*

        I used to have my music CDs sorted by length. I have 45 minutes before I have to leave? I have time for *this* CD.

    6. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

      I can sort-of understand this one, because I’ve seen a lot of databases that sort by full name rather than last name… meaning the output is alphabetized by author first name.

      This doesn’t stop it from being insane amounts of work and something she should have asked about but… I can see where she was coming from, dimly.

    7. Crencestre*

      I saw an example of that in a bookstore; in the Fiction department were books by the 18th century write Cao Xue Qin (author of the great Chinese “novel of manners” usually translated as “The Dream of the Red Chamber”). His novels were – you guessed it! – in between the “Ps” and the “Rs”. I gently explained to one of the managers that this author’s last name was actually “Cao” but I’m not sure if his books ever got reshelved…

    10. goddessoftransitory*

      Oh my GOD. That’s something I would have done when I was eight and redoing my bookshelf!

    12. Been There Done That*

      Depending on the age, not that unusual – except maybe because it was in publishing. For the past 15 or so years, I have had to tell new (young) hires that you alphabetize by people’s last name, not their first name. They didn’t understand why until I printed up a guest list for a 500 people and printed it in alpha by first name. Timed them checking in people (do you know how many Brittanys (with several spellings no less), Katherines (again several spellings), and Andrews there can be. Then resorted the list and printed it alpha order by last name. Timed them again. As you can imagine the second pass through the list was much faster. I figured they might remember the lesson better actually doing the task rather than me saying “because I said so” because to them I was “old” and didn’t know anything. Which is a whole different story! Like the time the boss decided to turn over social media for the agency to someone who wasn’t even on Facebook and didn’t even know how anything worked just because he considered me “old” (ummmmm…marketing and sales background plus I continually researched and learned social media trends) but you know…..I was old (at least to him).

      1. Smurfette*

        On top of that (depending on the type of event) you might have families attending, and there’s a good chance they’ll share a last name. So you can look up Gershwin and tick off 4 names instead of looking up George, Ira, Arthur, and Frances.

      2. Star Trek Nutcase*

        I was drug into coordinating an international conference of 500 after the nepo hire, highly paid, college wide conference coordinator was found to be incompetent. I was required to allow her to handle paid pre-registration & check-in. Among her other screw ups, on first conference day, I find out she didn’t alphabetize the registrant list or the name
        tags. It was a clusterf*ck and so embarrassing to have to continually apologize to attendees (all superstars in their field) for whom I had been the “face” of the conference for the yearling lead up.

        This was only 1 of 2 times in 40+ years I issued a work ultimatum – I’d quit if ever required to work with her again on anything no matter how small.

    13. Alex*

      One of our interns was tasked with building a new staff web directory on our website. And she did the same thing! Alphabetized the staff by their first name!

      Now, that could be handy internally “Oh…Becky….uh…Becky who?” but for an externally facing list it looked so unprofessional.

    14. EarlTheSachem*

      I had a college History professor who kept his office library organized by date of publication. Makes it easy to know where to file a new book, but what a pain in the butt to find anything.

      1. MA Dad*

        I’ve always been tempted to organize my records solely by original release date, but it just feels like a bad idea, so I keep it by band, then release date. I also keep a spreadsheet where I sort on release date so if I want to live through a specific era, at least I know where to pick from and more importantly, the ease of putting it back in the right spot.

  17. RogueTrainer*

    So, in this instance, I was the intern, and the weirdness came from someone who was working in the office where I was interning. It was with a political campaign in 2012 or so, and I was recruited to the internship after volunteering by one of the organizers. After about a month of being there, the other organizer (a man in his 30s) who did not recruit me got really paranoid that I was going to take his job. I was a 19 year old college student who was only home for the summer and was not interested in a full time position, but the guy got super combative- he’d challenge me with pop quiz type questions about how to do something, then get weirdly pissed off if I knew the answers. He’d pile work on me one day, then ignore me for 2 or 3, then get mad at me for not doing anything even though I had finished everything I was assigned. The office supervisor was rarely onsite and i didn’t really know how to deal with it. In my last week, Paranoid Guy was shocked that I was actually going back to school (even though I’d told him that practically weekly) and suddenly started acting like we were best friends and complimenting Mt work and telling me he’d miss having me around. It was definitely a whirlwind lesson in office politics, which was not the political educational opportunity I was expecting!

    1. bamcheeks*

      This has the makings of a great coming-of-age indie film, probably starring Kiernan Shipka as the likeable but chaotic lead.

    2. ferrina*

      Weirdly, I had an interviewee who did something similar. We had done a virtual interview, and he was supposed to do an in-person interview with the hiring manager and hiring manager’s grandboss. This was pre-2020, the job was in-person and the candidate was moving from where he was currently living to where the job was based.

      About 10 minutes before the interview was supposed to start, he reached out saying that he couldn’t make it in-person but would be happy to do a virtual interview. Apparently he was still several states away and couldn’t make because something had happened with his partner (I think an anxiety attack, but it might have been a logistic issue- either way, it was something that shouldn’t have resulted in several hours delay).

      The grandboss was not amused, and the candidate was taken out of the running.

      1. fhqwhgads*

        Even if it were something that should’ve caused a several hours delay, if you’re several states away you either ought to have left way before it even happened in order to get there or if it happened before you would’ve needed to leave you could’ve given more than 10 minutes notice. If it’s something so bad that there was a delaying in saying something it’s very unlikely to only suddenly be possible at that 10 minute mark. So weird.

    3. Melkhanik*

      I had a player in one of my TTRPG games do this, except they’re in their 50s and they didn’t bother to call or text me, I had to call them. I wasn’t happy about it.

  19. Anon for this*

    Going anon for this
    We had an intern who would vanish every day for pronged periods of time. The intern’s manager and I kept noticing the disappearances and started looking around for him. We were in a small mixed office/warehouse space. At one point we found a desk chair in a corner of the warehouse where clearly he had been napping. He must have figured out we found it, and so found a new nesting spot.
    We looked and looked and finally realized he had taken several throw pillows from the informal lounge/meeting area and put them under the stairwell outside our interior backdoor. One of the guys in my department put A MINT ON A PILLOW. The kid actually put a sticky note on it saying “touche”

    4. Steve-O*

      You really don’t need to say “going anon for this”, you can literally just pick any name in the entire world and use that one and not announce it to everyone.

      1. Lexi Vipond*

        This is more or less the only place on the internet that allows you to randomly post under two different names without being called out for sockpuppeting, I can’t see that it’s doing any harm if people are more comfortable disclosing it.

    5. Ellis Bell*

      “nesting spot” genuinely cracks me up. It makes interns seem like a breed of rare birds.

  20. Juicebox Hero*

    I hadn’t seen the intern who was flabbergasted by electric staplers before, and that was actually the mildest example. He took video of it in action and emailed it to the whole office. He was also gobsmacked by medical helicopters, naturally curly hair, wireless printers, believed that knights and dragons still exist in England, and was totally ignorant of current events.

    THat was in 2017, so I seriously wonder if after the intervening 7 years he still has his gormless exuberance, or if they’ve jaded him the way they have the rest of us. Although I’ve been jaded since approximately 1998 so…

    1. The Space Pope*

      While the poor guy was clearly very sheltered and that probably was not to his advantage, I am kind of jealous that he had that sense of wonder over such normal things at such a late age.

      1. ferrina*

        Nah, there’s wonder and then there’s obliviousness. He didn’t know naturally curly hair existed? That kind of says a lot about how insulated his social circle was. He had a hospital he could see from his home and just hadn’t noticed the medical choppers? And when he did he had to talk about them for ages? I mean, wonder is cute, but this is going beyond that. He also didn’t wonder at his own obliviousness, and instead thought he had to share it because he assumed that everyone else had the same level of insulation as he did? I mean, I go a little silly over simple things, but I don’t go so far as to proselytize to people that are already aware and are uninterested in my wonder. I would have gotten really ticked off with this guy.

        1. New Jack Karyn*

          It’s not the medical helicopter for me (they don’t go to every hospital–his local may not have been a landing site for one), it’s believing that knights AND DRAGONS existed in modern England.

        1. LaurCha*

          More likely, he was an extremely sheltered home-schooled evangelical with no access to ‘worldly’ media or unsupervised internet time.

          1. Chirpy*

            Not necessarily. I had a friend who (I assume) went to public school and somehow never noticed that the moon can be visible in daylight until her 20s.

    3. Emily Byrd Starr*

      The only person I’ve ever seen who was anywhere close to that intern was the guy who was totally in awe of the fact that a commuter train had an upstairs and a downstairs for seating. To be fair, he was a recent immigrant from a small island country that had no trains. Still, I found his enthusiasm over a two story train to be hilarious. Even if he had never been on a train before, how is a two story train any more impressive than a one story train?

      1. Irish Teacher.*

        I must say that until I read this comment, I had never heard of two storey trains.

        2. Orv*

          They’re pretty common in the US. The vertical clearance on much of our rail network is designed for double-stacked shipping containers, so there’s plenty of vertical space for a second level on passenger cars. It’s particularly common on commuter trains because it’s an easy way to add more capacity.

      2. Sharpie*

        I don’t know but we don’t have the double decker trains in the UK – our rail infrastructure dates back to the nineteenth century so all the old bridges are too low. But when I go across to the Continent, you bet I’m sitting upstairs on the train if I can!

      3. Admin of Sys*

        I mean, the amount of Americans who go nuts over double decker busses in the UK would imply the extra story is very interesting

      4. goddessoftransitory*

        I still get a bit squealy over double decker busses, so I can appreciate this.

      6. SarahKay*

        Uhh… I live in the UK, with plenty of one-storey trains, but as a train enthusiast I was delighted to get to go in the top deck of a two-storey train when visiting Switzerland.

        My step-dad, also a big fan of trains (when I was a kid we bonded playing with my Lego railway set), was deeply envious.

      7. Lexi Vipond*

        A two storey train is absolutely more impressive than a one storey train.

        (I still haven’t quite got my head round the fact that they now run double decker buses between Edinburgh and Glasgow, when it used to just be coaches. Upstairs on the motorway??)

    4. goddessoftransitory*

      Well, knights DO still exist in England; people are knighted for services to the country or crown. They just don’t run around in armor sticking swords in ogres and such, alas; such is our fallen world.

      1. Flor*

        I mean, Sir Ian McKellen was hanging around with the hobbit and dwarves who went after a dragon; it’s clearly an easy mistake to make!

      2. Ellis Bell*

        Slightly the reverse but when we were kids my sister got it into her head that Disneyland wasn’t real, but as legendary and as make-believe as Narnia. Unfortunately she chose to share this theory at school in the middle of a lesson, when she reacted derisively to one of her classmates who said they were going there on holiday

    5. Orv*

      This puts in perspective the embarrassing situation I had where someone told me to fax something and I’d never used a fax machine before.

    6. EarlTheSachem*

      To be fair, knights and dragons DO still exist in England. Except the knights don’t generally wear armor and joust, and the dragon is located in the Attenborough Komodo Dragon House at the London Zoo.

    7. Heffalump*

      You’d think he’d realize that even if the electric stapler was the first one his coworkers had ever seen, they’d seen it before he arrived at that office.

      If I were managing him, in the midst of the talk about workplace do’s and don’ts, I’d gently probe to find out what his lived experience had been, how he got that way.

  21. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

    Alas! My org doesn’t have interns except for one years ago, who may or may not have been…illicit?… because we didn’t have an intern program and an ED just hired in an 19-year-old male to be his intern? I wish I knew those details. Anyway, Tom was here for a grand total of maybe 3-4 months, until we had our annual black tie, $500-per-plate, fundraising dinner where he promptly got completely shit-faced on the free champagne and wine being passed during the pre-dinner cocktail hour, and had to sleep it off in the ED’s hotel room that night. We had drink tickets after that year.

  22. La Triviata*

    One summer we had an intern – hired because she was a good friend of the daughter of one of our directors. She liked to wear tube tops, one-shoulder tops, and so one that left her shoulders and upper back bare. She couldn’t tolerate having air moving across her shoulders so she’d go around the office turning off the circulation units by the windows. Since the building HVAC automatically went off for an hour or so in the afternoons – and she was on the west side of the office – this meant that at a certain time in the office there’d been no AC or air circulation for that time. Which meant everyone else was suddenly roasting. She wouldn’t stop turning off the air circulation, no one could make her, so everyone else had to suffer so she’d be comfortable.

      1. goddessoftransitory*

        As in “put on a shawl or jacket and keep your mitts off the thermostat.” How could that not be possible?

        1. New Jack Karyn*

          I mean, she probably ignored the first couple of times she was told that, I get it. But her supervisor not being extremely blunt with her about it? Not simply letting her go if she continued to act like that? That part I don’t get.

          1. Someone*

            probably due to the “hired because she was a good friend of the daughter of one of our directors” part.

  23. Bird Lady*

    When I worked for a small cultural organization, I had a summer intern who was a communications major and wanted to work for us doing social media. I was delighted because she already had an excellent portfolio of social media she had done for her parents’ business and it took something off my plate during the busy summer tourist season.

    I got a summer flu and needed to take some time off to recover. She really stepped up and became an essential shield against people who were demanding my time while I was ill. So, I was deeply surprised one day when she called me and said I needed to come into work. My commute was a little under an hour away, and I was sick. I asked her why I was needed.

    Apparently two of program leaders had asked for her to log into Facebook to promote a Black History Conference we were hosting. She had agreed, since I had indicated it was okay for them to do so. After all, you’d think the Director of Education and the Curator would have sense not to post inappropriate material to social media.

    Readers, they put out a call for applications for reparations and promised as many free registrations to the conference as desired so long as the person wrote an essay about how they were personally victimized by racism. And while she and I were sympathetic to the idea behind the post, it was worded in a very problematic way. The Curator and Director refused to re-word it. They said if she edited it or deleted it, she would be fired.

    She knew the first thing to do was call me so I could deal with the problematic wording. When that girl left, I wrote the best letter of recommendation I could write.

    1. Bruce*

      Wow, have you stayed in touch? Sounds like someone to keep your eye on… Good judgement and willing to escalate when it matters!

      1. Bird Lady*

        I wish! She moved to Portugal to run her grandparents’ vineyard and cell reception is spotty. I’ve her vino verde though and it was literally the best wine I’ve ever had.

        1. Firefighter (Metaphorical)*

          I love this intern/viticulturist (I actually don’t know what the word for winemaker is. Maybe just winemaker?)

    2. ferrina*

      That intern sounds amazing! That is certainly something worth calling your sick boss about- good on her!

      1. Archi-detect*

        one of the clearest times to call a boss who is out is when a situation is bad and is actively getting worse, and they are the only one who can stop it

  24. Jane Bingley*

    Sort of a backwards internship crazy story. I was hired as a summer intern for a local politician for a 12-week term. The primary task assigned to me was planning a big community event that was held every year – this was always the intern’s job.

    I had it planned in my first week – space rented, food confirmed, guest speakers lined up, promotional materials prepped, sponsorships funded. I spent my second week documenting what I’d done so the next intern could follow a step-by-step guide. By my third week I was out of work to do, and my boss was astounded at how quickly and efficiently I’d worked.

    Aside from work the week of the event, I spent the rest of the summer basically operating as a second aide – answering emails and phone calls, helping connect citizens with services, occasionally dealing with aggrieved people attempting to start a sit-in. I also spent the last few weeks helping the politician prepare for the upcoming election, even though that was openly against the rules of my government-funded internship.

    The election was scheduled to take place about three weeks into the fall and I’d be clear that I had to completely end my work with her as I was moving to a different nearby city for school in the fall. After a summer of hard work going above and beyond, the politician threw a fit that I wouldn’t volunteer to help her campaign and refused to give me a reference. (That was fine, because by then I’d learned enough to know I was not going to work in politics ever again.)

    1. Jane Bingley*

      Oh, also – our constituency was 45% Muslim, so I had insisted that we have Halal meat options available and that they be barbequed on a separate grill. My boss was confused by this and didn’t really understand what made meat Halal – I had tried to explain that it needed to be slaughtered humanely and typically an Imam prays over the animal before its death. She was annoyed because the Halal meet was more expensive than the standard meat, but I pushed hard and we served Halal meat options.

      The next year, they served “Halal” meat, and then there was a massive scandal when it turned out the politician just prayed a Christian prayer over regular packaged hot dogs before bringing them to the event.

      1. Silver Robin*

        Oh that is really bad…even more so since most regular hotdogs have pork in them too…

        glad you were able to stand up for them the year before, learned something, and got out.

        1. goddessoftransitory*

          That is REALLY bad. Like if a government did it (as opposed to one pol) there’d be an uprising bad.

      3. CommanderBanana*

        Having unfortunately worked in an org for local elected officials, I can confirm this horrible behavior is pretty typical of them.

      6. Quill*

        … Oh nooooo.

        The scandal was well deserved but also yikes for everybody who trusted this setup.

      7. Dawn*

        Oh lord, I remember when that happened. “Mistakenly,” she said. “I was misled,” she said.

        Her actual last name is just sort of the cherry on the cake there.

        1. Jane Bingley*

          LOL. Apparently I misled her, since I was the one who attempted to teach her the basics of Halal meat.

  25. Cici*

    I can share my own story of being an intern! Nothing crazy, but some unique experiences. It was at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and I can totally see how the Night at the Museum movie people were inspired. I had to take an elevator to the 6th floor to get to my desk, but then had to walk UP a flight of stairs to get the my bosses office…on the 4th floor. Part of this walk was also through the human anatomy bone collection, think library shelves but with open drawers full of old bones! We got to do a tour of the basement archives as a treat where I saw a mummified bull, actual shrunken heads and the echinoderm collection, which is a large room full, floor to ceiling, with jars of preserved sea creatures. Definitely not somewhere I would want to be stuck at night!

    1. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

      Fun fact: there was an airing of Night at the Museum II in one of the Smithsonians (American History, I think) with an all-night sleepover after.

  26. Don't Blog about the President's Family*

    Please do not repost this in round ups.

    I used to work with the adult child of a sitting President (let’s say their name was Sam). To say the President was extremely disliked and unpopular in the city where we worked would be an understatement. We had an intern start one day and then literally the next day the intern was gone. When I asked the department director about where the intern was, she was real cagey about it. Later a co-worker found out that the intern had posted about how they were going to be sharing an office with Sam and it was the perfect time to start being nice to [members of Predisent’s political party]; how Sam was very, very, nice; etc. In addition to the intern disappearing, the blog post was wiped from the internet. My co-worker’s partner was an IT person and was able to find it somehow, but man, the government did not want that info out there. (It wasn’t like it was a secret Sam worked there…)

    After that they also wrote a social media policy for interns.

    1. Marzipan Shepherdess*

      Mmm…well, hindsight is always 20-20, but that policy should have been written and discussed BEFORE Sam came to work there. Sorry, folks; mental telepathy is great fun in fantasy and SF, but most of us suck at actually having it – so don’t expect people to automatically know what YOU expect them to do in an unusual (or unique) situation if you don’t tell them!

      1. Don't Blog about the President's Family*

        I don’t disagree, but they were weird about a lot of stuff when it came to Sam. They used a fake last name for them on the phone list; there were suddenly new employees that started just before Sam, who were clearly Secret Service. I don’t think they really knew how to handle it.

        Also this might out the specific President but I don’t care that much – it was also at a time when social media wasn’t as ubiquitous. Like maybe personal blogs were still kind of new? Facebook was still pretty novel so I don’t know if places had as robust of social media policies as now.

        1. Dawn*

          If you’re talking about the era I think you’re talking about, almost nowhere would have had a social media policy; the entire American legal system didn’t really have legislation regarding the internet in place at that point and police and judges had no clue what Facebook even was.

          1. Don't Blog about the President's Family*

            If the President’s first name starts with a G, then you’re thinking of the correct era.

  27. TGMC*

    It’s me, I’m the intern…
    I worked and lived on a cattle farm in college (animal science student). I put diesel into the gas skidsteer.

    A few years later, much older and wiser (I’m sure), I was supervising some undergrads for my research work. They sunk the university’s brand new John Deere gator. Twice. While my PI was on vacation.
    Words were exchanged, eventually… but we did at least abide by his Number 1 rule, which was “Don’t do anything that will get me on the front of the Des Moines Register”!

      2. TGMC*

        It was a VERY wet summer. (2010, central Iowa, for those who might have been there.) One student thought he could get the gator through the puddle-pond despite me telling him not to… saw him shame-faced walking back not long after, to find a tractor.

        That night around sundown, the next student to check the cows saw the tracks leading into the puddle-pond and thought ‘oh okay, someone’s gotten through that okay, I’ll be fine!’

        I got a rather panicked call at 9:30pm… no one could pull it out till the next morning, by which time the engine was Officially Messed Up.

    3. Eeyore is my spirit animal*

      My boss once put diesel into a gas. In his defense it was our only gas truck. He never lived it down.

      1. PhyllisB*

        My nephew did this once. He was working for his uncle and the truck he was driving HAD been diesel and for some unknown reason they had it converted to a gas engine….but didn’t think to inform nephew (who was the sole driver of this truck.) Luckily, they were understanding about it but, REALLY??!!

      2. Sharpie*

        Diesel into a petrol vehicle….how?! Here in the UK, the diesel nozzles are bigger than the unleaded ones, they won’t fit in a petrol car.

        1. Dawn*

          I think this is not so much “a car that was filled up at a station,” it sounds like most people here are talking about, like, farm or construction equipment that gets hand(ish) filled.

        2. londonedit*

          It is, however, entirely possible to fill a diesel car with unleaded. Just ask my mum.

    4. Monkey Wrench Thrower*

      My unit loaned a gas one ton truck to another unit. They managed to put diesel in it. How our mechanic didn’t wring necks at the other unit I’m not sure. Dang truck hasn’t run right since, even with new fuel lines.

  28. Czech Mate*

    My coworker was walking to the office kitchen to heat up her lunch when the 20 year old intern stopped her and said, “So Jane, what do you DO here?” Coworker, taken aback, asked why he wanted to know. He excitedly explained that his supervisor had told him to get to know everyone in the office and ask them to tell him more about their work and professional journey.

      1. Silver Robin*

        That there was a noticeably emphasis on a particular word. It calls that word into question, so the tone made it read as “So Jane, what do you do here, since it seems like you do nothing?”. If all words had the same emphasis, it would be a much more neutral question. The casualness and suddenness of the phrasing also adds to it. “Hi Jane, I am trying to get a sense of who does what in the org, what do you do here?” comes across very differently because it has a greeting and provides context for the question.

        For a more obvious version of the emphasis issue:

        *I* never said she stole my money: the claim was not made by me
        I *never* said she stole my money: That is not the claim I made
        I never *said* she stole my money: I never stated that directly
        I never said *she* stole my money: I accused someone else
        I never said she *stole* my money: I accused her of a different action
        I never said she stole *my* money: Someone else’s money was stolen
        I never said she stole my *money*: She stole something else from me

          1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

            In theatre class years ago, one of our warm-ups was sitting or standing in a circle repeating a sentence, and each person emphasized the word after the one the last person had emphasized. We had several, but the one I remember offhand was “that is the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard.” It was fun!

      2. Filthy Vulgar Mercenary*

        I’m not the person you responded to but I read it as the emphasis on the word DO (as opposed to what do YOU do here). “What do you DO here” implies the questioner suspects you perhaps don’t really do anything.

        1. Czech Mate*

          Yes, exactly–it sounded like he was asking this beloved senior staff member what she DID, ANYWAY, implying that she didn’t actually do anything. We got a good laugh about it and now frequently ask each other “What would you say you DO here?”

  29. That Coworker's Coworker*

    This was back before everything was online and we still had a product library full of manufacturers’ binders: I asked the summer intern to alphabetize the binders within each division, by name of manufacturer. This didn’t take her very long, and I thought all was well… until I couldn’t find a 3M binder, asked her, and she told me she threw away all the binders whose manufacturers had numbers in their names, because “those can’t be alphabetized”.

    2. Hannah Lee*

      That intern was destined for upper management in some poorly run company.

      “I don’t care what it is, if it doesn’t fit my worldview, the range of things I am currently aware of, just get rid of it, stop doing it and make it go away”

    3. Myrin*

      Threw away? Like not even put in a separate place or even in a big pile somewhere? Oh no!

      1. That Coworker's Coworker*

        Yep, threw away – as in those binders went out with the trash days before I discovered this.

        I know the 3M binder doesn’t sound like a tragic loss, but this was back before everything could be googled, and meant having to call the product reps on the phone and get them to send or bring another binder, and in the meantime we were missing info we needed in order to spec those products on our projects. It wasn’t the end of the world: just a headache-inducing delay.

        1. Firefighter (Metaphorical)*

          It’s the throwing them away that makes this a story! “My intern didn’t know how to file numbers in an alphabetical system” – ok they are new, they will learn. “My intern throws away other people’s stuff if it confuses them” – WHAT

          1. Trina*

            Phrasing it that way reminds me of the story of the employee who was told to handle very complicated paperwork to transfer a timeshare because of a charity auction their work had run, and they got so stymied by weird legal requirements and a complete lack of support from work that they just burned the paperwork in a ditch and claimed everything had gotten lost in the mail. MUCH more justified than this case, though!

    4. A Poster Has No Name*

      Ok, except you really can just file that one under “M” because it originated as Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing.

  30. frenchblue*

    My old company had an intern who had just graduated with her master’s degree. She had absolutely no work experience, but she was shocked and dismayed to find out that people with “only a bachelors degree” could get a FT job while she struggled to land an internship. She spent her internship telling everyone all about graduate school (including several staff with multiple masters degrees), what it was like, how it was such a good investment, and how anyone with half a brain should have a masters degree.
    She was extremely rude, she regularly left early or disappeared without notifying anyone, and her work was subpar at best, so it really wasn’t a huge mystery why she was having trouble finding a job.

    1. Hannah Lee*

      We usually wound up with pretty good interns each summer, we’d bring in people who were in MBA programs to work in process improvement.

      There was one guy who was smart, but was very wrapped up in the concept of advanced degrees, and would be incredibly condescending to those who had “only a bachelors degree”. Which was odd because he, himself, had only a bachelors degree at the time, since he was still working on his masters.

      He was also a bit arrogant-cocky, assumed he was the smartest person in the room (in a department of very smart people) and that he should be in charge of more things, and could manage any situation.

      At the end of the internship, we had a meeting where each intern presented on whatever project they had been working on, with data, analysis, recommendations. While they had a FT employee who acted as an advisor as they were developing the presentation, they created all the content and decided what was important to include. We were a very fact/data / logic based group, so recommendations should make sense given the data presented, and the norm is to have backup slides that drill down on any summaries and support the interpretation, conclusion.

      All was well with interns 1, 2, and 3. Things went pretty much as expected, some where stronger than others, or more involved, but they were all pretty good with no obvious gaps or gaffes. Then came the Smarter than Everyone intern. He starts rolling through his presentation, and there’s a clear logic jump from the data summary on page 5 and the conclusion on page 6, recommendation on page 7. So people started asking questions to clarify his thinking. No problem … he goes to his back up slides and shows one that … still does not make it make sense. So he pulls out another. Nope.

      Finally someone asks about some data point, factor that … had he presented about it … probably would have tied his presentation together. He realizes the lifeline he’s been tossed and starts confidently expounding on that, what the data showed, the trends, the obvious conclusions “As you can see here during Q3 and Q4 the output increase dramatically …”

      … while gesturing at a completely blank wall.

      3 minutes of him pantomiming as though there were an actual PowerPoint slide to illustrate what he was saying. Our director finally cut it off when the intern pantomimed advancing to the next (also imaginary) slide to make his next point.

      1. Zweisatz*

        Hu??? I do not have to understand people’s decision making, but it is fascinating.

  31. londonedit*

    One of my favourite AAM intern stories from years gone by was from the person who enthusiastically made use of all the perks they’d been told about, not realising you were meant to fit them in *around* your actual work. As far as I remember it she was swanning off to the 12pm yoga class and then going to the lunch-and-learn event and then hitting the gym at 3pm – basically, she was hardly ever actually at her desk. I love it because it’s such a classic example of miscommunication – the company thought they were showing how fun and flexible they were by highlighting all these perks, but the intern thought it was a free-for-all.

    I don’t have any bad intern stories, but years and years ago we did have a new editorial assistant who left at lunchtime on her first day and never returned. No warning, nothing, just said she was going to get some lunch and never came back. About three days later she finally emailed in to say she didn’t think the job was for her because she was disappointed to have been asked to make a cup of tea for the boss, when it was her understanding that the job would involve purely editorial tasks.

    1. Green Goose*

      I loved that intern story too, and her defense, that was really on her manager to better explain to her.

      1. Dawn*

        And she also thought that she was showing what a *good* intern she was by taking advantage of all these employer-sponsored programs. Like it’s not just that they said “these are available to you” and she said “Oh boy!” it’s that she thought they were giving her a tour of all the perks because they wanted her actively engaged with them.

  32. NMitford*

    At one job, at a company that was very hierarchical and great-great-grandbosses were downright feared, an intern decided he wasn’t being given challenging enough work. His recourse was to skip over multiple layers of management and waltz past an admin’s desk and into the Chief Operating Officer’s to demand that he be given the type of work he felt was commensurate with his expectations.

    He seemed to expect the COO to say something like, “You know, you’re right Fergus. Pick any project you want and we’ll let you lead it,” and was deeply disappointed when the COO threw him out on his ear. The admin he’d blown past was telling the story all over the building within minutes of it happening.

    At that same job, a marketing staff member’s son was an intern in the finance department, which was going paperless. One of his assignments was to scan years’ worth of paper files, which he did uncomplainingly for weeks, about two hours’ worth every day. An assignment that is certainly no college intern’s idea of a good time. People complimented his father about what a great kid he had for years afterward.

    1. Lisa*

      Re: the scanning intern, as an upper-division college student trying to get meaningful work experience that would stink (I assume he also had other more interesting work though!), but as a high school senior or college freshman I would have happily done that full-time the whole summer.

      1. NMitford*

        He did have other, more meaningful work, but just chunked out the scanning so that he did a bit every day, usually first thing in the morning before other people needed to use the copier on which he was working. It was just the stark contrast between him and other other intern that people remarked on.

        1. Marzipan Shepherdess*

          That showed good time management, good judgment and an equally good amount of maturity and commonsense humility. That intern was a keeper!

      2. Elspeth*

        100%! Scanning incoming mail was my first job at my company, the summer after I graduated high school. I was efficient, accurate, and had a good attitude so I gained a good reputation. I did that for two summers, then interned for 2 summers. 20 years later, I’m still here and an AVP. It’s been a great company, but I would have never expected to still be here when I started that summer job haha.

      3. Dandylions*

        TBF it says 2 hrs a day so I assume the other hours are spent on some work that let the intern learn.

        That said many, many intern programs suck.

        1. NMitford*

          Yes, he did do other work the rest of the day. He had the summer to get the scanning project done and just chunked it out into manageable amounts every day.

      4. Jamie Starr*

        You can learn A LOT from having to scan things, or shred things, or (re)organize files. Especially if they’re financial files! (e.g. how much things cost, who the main vendors are, etc.)

      5. ferrina*

        I did exactly that in high school- I did manual data entry and nothing else. I was also the kid of someone that worked there (though my parent had vigorously protested my being hired, because she didn’t want to work with her kid).

        It was a relaxing job, and I got really good at 10-key (such a helpful skill). They had a serious backlog and I got through almost all of it by the end of the summer (to my boss’s amazement). My boss ended up offering me part-time work during the school year, which I happily accepted.

        1. Butterfly Counter*

          I wasn’t an intern, but I did data entry as part of my work in the X-Ray department at a hospital as they went paperless. Previously, all records had been kept on index cards. Yes, really. I had to go through each card and create new computer files for patients from scratch. Took 2 or 3 of us the whole summer, especially as we found multiple cards for the same patient that just hadn’t been properly searched before.

          What made it kind of funny was that 2 summers later, the hospital decided on a new computer program. However, the files couldn’t be shifted digitally. I had to print them out and re-enter them into the new system manually (it went much quicker than the cards). I was so very good at 10 key by the end of that summer.

      6. Steve for Work Purposes*

        Yeah as a college student I had a part time job in a law office as a general dogsbody and I -loved- getting $10/hour to scan and organize files, especially since I could listen to music on my iPod while I did so. It wasn’t the entirety of my job, maybe like 1/3 of what I did, but it was one of the bits I enjoyed, and I got good work experience out of the job in general (I’m in STEM, but that job leveled up a lot of time/people/difficult situation management soft skills which has paid off). But honestly even as an intern I wouldn’t’ve complained as long as it wasn’t my only job, I find stuff like that relaxing.

    2. Quill*

      Oh, I was the scanning intern once, before podcasts and smartphones, and I applaud him.

      I used to do 3o minutes and then wander the department offering to clean things.

    3. Festively Dressed Earl*

      My college did blind externships one year and sent me to the office of a pretty far right politician. After one or two stints answering the phones and listening to constituents who didn’t think this person was extreme enough, I gladly did as much scanning and filing as possible for the remainder of my time there.

  33. Meg*

    This happened this week! I’m fairly lax in what I allow summer student interns to wear– we’re not public facing and as long as it meets safety guidelines wear whatever you want. But my one of my summer interns did make me want to… re-evaluate that stance. She came in a few days ago jeans (acceptable), close toed shoes (acceptable), and what I can only describe as a strapless blue and white floral bustier. Very much lingerie in style. While technically allowed it was definitely… a choice.

    1. Emily Byrd Starr*

      I think a reasonable dress code is to wear clothing that covers the three B’s: breasts, belly button, and butt crack.

    2. nekosan*

      Oh gosh, I always have to swallow the “Oh dear, it looks like you forgot your shirt!”

      In my mind, appropriate for evening clubbing is not necessarily appropriate for the office.

      1. Student*

        There are many pieces of clothing that are fashionable, but still not appropriate apparel in all situations.

      2. Gumby*

        And yet, when you also filter that page for ‘work’ under occasion, the list drops to 2.

      3. Paint N Drip*

        Yes, that is in style! I think the explosion of influencers really confuses folks without other respected influences in their life. Intern perspective: “I am seeing this business girly influencer crush her job looking SO cute, I also want to crush my job so I may emulate what I am seeing”
        Intern doesn’t grasp that the life/outfit shown ~on social media~ doesn’t necessarily correlate to real work life. I see that a lot with younger folks whose “grownups” are in a different industry or sector (@me, my mom wore scrubs my whole life.. what is business clothing?) OR younger folks who don’t trust the adults in their life (mom wears X but she isn’t cool so I’m not gonna wear that, when she tells me I can’t wear Y at work she doesn’t know what she’s talking about)

  34. gregorian*

    A few summers ago, a masters-level intern asked me if the Fourth of July was always on a Tuesday. I was confused as to how he wouldn’t already know the answer, but cheerfully said “Nope, it’s celebrated on the 4th each year, whatever day that happens to be!” He replied, “Okay, I was just wondering because my birthday is always on a Thursday, except this year when it was randomly on a Saturday.” I was flabbergasted but decided to let it go, as I didn’t have the time to explain the concept of…..calendars? to an adult.

    1. Liane*

      They didn’t let slip how their birthday was always on the same day of the week? I must know!

      1. Irish Teacher.*

        Yeah, I was expecting gregorian to say they said something like because Easter was always on a Sunday, which would still be ridiculous, but would at least make some kind of sense. This makes none.

      2. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

        I’m guessing that he grew up thinking his birthday is on the day that his family celebrates it with a cake or party, and they always chose a Thursday night, until one year they decided to have it on a Saturday. I can imagine a kid, up until a certain age — maybe 6 or 7, not really understanding that the party can be on a close proximity day and not ONLY on their actual birthday. I’ve certainly met a few adults who seem to think that they can’t have their celebration on any day except their actual birthday.

        1. ferrina*

          This was my guess. He probably associated his birthday with whenever it was celebrated. But man, that makes me really wonder about his family of origin….at a certain point, most adults sort of take over their own birthday celebration (or at least help coordinate it or help with someone else’s birthday!), but I’m guessing he never did.

          1. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

            Right! I chose age 6-7 because they are usually in school and are exposed to other people outside of their family. They start to observe that birthdays, and other holidays, are sometimes celebrated on a convenient day rather than The Day — e.g. his friend Billy says his birthday is on May 2, which is a Tuesday, but the party is on the following Saturday. AHA! moment for most kids.

        2. gregorian*

          I’d buy that if this intern was still a teenager! He was 24/25 and in a masters’ degree program with a fairly high bar to entry. I guess some people are just more booksmart.

    2. Collette*

      Were they maybe born on an American Thanksgiving Day? And then somehow thought their birthday was ON Thanksgiving, instead of on that calendar date?

      I had a friend who was married on Thanksgiving who then received anniversary wishes on Thanksgiving instead of the calendar date from confused relatives for years after.

      1. Admin of Sys*

        Oh I like that actually! I may move any future anniversaries to ‘2nd Saturday’ rather than an actual date.

        1. Arin*

          My boyfriend and I have three anniversaries: the date on the Gregorian calendar, the date on the Hebrew calendar, and the first Friday night/Saturday morning in June as a “compromise” between the two :) We also relitigate whether or not this makes sense every year, which prevents either of us from forgetting it’s happening. We’ve been together three years now.

      2. NotJane*

        I was born on Thanksgiving Day and we usually ended up celebrating my birthday on Thanksgiving because the family was already getting together. I’m sure that was a little confusing when I was a kid, lol.

        1. Berkeleyfarm*

          My grandmother was also born on Thanksgiving, and obviously the days coincided often enough.

          She was actually a super traditionalist about cake AND ice cream for birthdays but I think she was ok with pumpkin pie and See’s candy if it was her birthday. Mind you, back then we regularly had 18 or so for dinner so an extra dessert would not have gone amiss!

    3. ICodeForFood*

      OMG! This reminds me of the employee (not an intern) who didn’t know that all the months except February had the same number of days in them each year!

      1. CalendarGirl*

        Um, don’t know how to tell you but other months don’t have the same number of days in them besides February…

        1. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

          I think that ICodeForFood means that, for example, March always has 31 days every year, and February is the only month that sometimes has an extra day.

          1. ICodeForFood*

            Yes, that was what I meant. He wondered aloud how many days a particular month would have “this year,” and was shocked to learn that month (which was not February) had the same number of days every year…

        2. New Jack Karyn*

          January always has 31 days. June always has only 30 days. February does not always have only 28 days.

    4. londonedit*

      Not as bad as that, but I do remain perplexed at the number of actual adults who have no idea when the various public holidays are. Like, you’ll mention being excited about the bank holiday at the end of May and they’ll say ‘Oh! Is there a bank holiday? When’s that?’ There’s always a holiday on the last Monday of May here. Same with the last Monday in August – always a bank holiday. And yet people are reliably surprised by it!

      1. Lexi Vipond*

        If they’re in Scotland they have some excuse. We have the first Monday in August (by the end of August the weather’s turned cold and the schools are back), but companies based in England might take the English holiday instead.

        Most of Scotland does have the last Monday in May, but Edinburgh and I think Dundee traditionally have the third Monday instead. West Lothian seems to have changed at some point to taking the Edinburgh rather than the Glasgow holiday (lots of people work in Edinburgh but have kids in WL schools), but it doesn’t help much, because half the old mining villages take the Monday after their gala day instead, and have their May holiday in June.

        I *think* we officially do have Good Friday and don’t have Easter Monday, to make up for 2nd Jan, but I’m not sure, and most places that close for Easter at all will do both regardless.

        I actually love the determined localness of it, but you do need to keep your wits about you!

  35. BeeCees*

    Not summer intern but in the fall/winter term.

    My company offer an open bar during the holiday party on a Friday in December. All drinks including alcoholic ones were free. One student got so drunk during the party that he initiated a fist fight with one of the executives. The student was fired on the Monday.

    It was a crappy way to fail the work term. The work term was almost over.

  36. tjamls*

    Law enforcement agency intern used skiptrace program to look up celebrities’ home addresses. Someone from IT called to ask a manager if there was a business purpose for those searches (sometimes we have had to look up famous people), and the intern was immediately escorted out. It was a few weeks into a full-time semester internship, not a summer, so he was working for us in lieu of classes. I sometimes wonder how the school handled that.

    1. It's Marie - Not Maria*

      Where I work, we use similar programs in the course of business. This is 100% a termination offense if you don’t have a legitimate business reason – which is very rare.

    2. Evan Þ*

      My aunt, who’s a nurse at a Los Angeles hospital, has told us about some of her coworkers who got fired for looking up celebrities’ medical records.

      She’s also said they end up assigning her to a lot of celebrities when they’re in her hospital, because she’s not really in touch with American pop culture so she treats them a lot more like ordinary people.

  37. Poison I.V. drip*

    We had an intern who worked only when he felt like it. Some pay periods he wouldn’t show up at all, except on Friday afternoon to fill out his timesheet. So he’d have a timesheet showing a total of 10 minutes worked, that 10 minutes being the time he spent doing his timesheet.

    1. Liane*

      Give this intern points for having enough professionalism to fill out the timesheet accurately.

    2. Sharpie*

      And now I want to know…

      If a non-exempt worker only logs the ten minutes work that it takes to fill out the timesheet, do they still get paid for the whole week? Alison?

      1. It's Marie - Not Maria*

        HR Professional here: Nonexempt workers only get paid for actual time worked. If someone is exempt, it depends on why they missed work whether or not they get their full salary.

        1. Archi-detect*

          I know our system does regular time, overtime scheduled, overtime unscheduled, admin leave(so not from your pool but for some specific purpose), normal leave for sick/vacation, borrowed leave or unpaid leave. If you’re full time, your sheet has to add up to 80 for two weeks with some combination of those, plus overtime of course

  38. Anonymous Intern Story*

    I had multiple internships for state-level politicians and met a lot of strange characters, both staff and other interns, which surprised me. I had assumed these internships would have attracted type-A, highly extroverted strivers. That said, I don’t really have any great particular stories about them.

    But, I had one memorable strange experience. I was doing coat check at the governor’s Christmas party, and at one point a drunk state representative came up to me and asked if I could take a picture of her. I was bemused but agreed. She was giggling and walked over to a life-size statue and hugged it in a suggestive way. I took the picture and then quickly moved to a different area. I cringed at the time but find it funny now. I told my supervisor later and he wasn’t surprised!

      1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

        I interned in the U.S. Senate many years ago and the interns were high-flyers on paper — they all went to great schools, at least — but many were entitled jerks. One day at lunch another intern told the rest of us about how her parents had stayed in some hotel that still had real keys, and she’d kept one so she and her friends could break into the room weeks later and drain the minibar. Jerky but harmless, IMO — until she described scaring the crap out of the “old people” whose room it now was, and refusing to leave. Everyone else thought it was HILARIOUS. I thought it was gross and potentially a crime?

          1. Archi-detect*

            also terrible policy to not renew the door if a key is lost. Hotel gets kids charged, but would be gone after by the scared people for nor preventing this. I know I’d try to sue the hotel

          2. allathian*

            Absolutely. Sure, they had the stolen key but they hadn’t committed to paying for the use of the room.

            I haven’t stayed in a hotel with physical room keys since I was a kid, and that was a small B&B.

  39. Honeybee*

    Prior to the pandemic, my normally work in office job had to spend a week or so working remotely (steam exploded in front of our building that managed to cover the building in asbestos! ) and during this week, we had a company outing to a baseball game. Since we were all spread out over the city, we ended up all leaving work atvarying times to get to the game on time. We normally worked until 6, but that day I had to leave by like 430 and we determined our intern should leave around 530. We all get to the game, but can’t find the intern. We called, texted, didn’t hear from him in awhile. Eventually, we go on without him and as we’re in, he finally gets back to us. He fell asleep. How did he have time to fall asleep when he was supposed to leave work 30 minutes early?

    Same company, year before and in a different office, we had a few interns. During lunch time ish, we are informed that we need to evacuate the street because they found what looked to be an unexploded bomb thing (cold war era missile thing – i don’t remember the exactdetails) and we all needed to get out asap. we couldn’t find one of the interns and he wasn’t answering the calls we were making. He ended up being like 30 blocks away at a sit down restaurant for his hour lunch. Thankfully what they found was only a time capsule from the 80s so thankfully nothing dangerous.

      1. Honeybee*

        I know! Those were 2 separate offices but in the same neighborhood.

        Funny thing too, my last job opened its office after the pandemic IN THE SAME NEIGHBORHOOD! Basically, one of the old offices was on the north side of the street and the new job was on the south side of the street before it so the buildings basically butted up against each other. I went and visited the door person at the old office because it was so close. Thankfully, I actually like that area despite those very catastrophic things happening so I was actually happy to be down there again.

      2. PhilG*

        In England (London in particular) & Germany it’s not uncommon to find unexploded ordnance from WW II during construction.

        1. goddessoftransitory*

          I remember seeing a video of one they found in the countryside and detonated, and man, those things are still impressive and dangerous!

  40. CubeFarmer*

    We’re a small organization. We have a colleague who considers it his mission to assemble a ragtag group of interns almost every summer. I don’t think we have enough projects to keep all these fine people busy for several weeks in the summer, but…not my circus. Anyway, they keep us all young.

    Last year, we had an intern whom everyone considered to be a little…off. Not dangerously so, but he was not a good fit for our office. This was shown by his commandeering of our small office library to use as his private office. He would go as far as shutting the door. No one in my organization shuts their office door, unless you’re taking a loud Zoom or need to have private conversation.

    My colleague who marginally supervised the interns threw up his hands and wouldn’t do anything about this. None of us could say we were exactly affected by the intern’s unilateral use of the space, but at the same time, it was weird and definitely not in keeping with office culture. We all wondered what he did in there, because as far as we knew, he didn’t have any specific projects.

    Summer soon came to an end, and this intern departed for campus. All of us breathed a sign of relief when we knew he was gone for sure.

    This year, and I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not, we don’t have our typical bumper crop of intern faces. Maybe my colleague learned his lesson.

  41. Audogs*

    I need to go read the linked past stories. I coffee choked when I read “pillow shams”.

    1. Physics Lab Tech*

      I went back and reread them as well! Allison’s advice to not report the tattoo was surprising to me at first, but with her explanation it makes sense why the former intern should let sleeping dog’s lie.

  42. So Many Knopes*

    About 8 years ago the company I worked at decided to let all the interns get together and go to lunch as a team building exercise. They let them pick the restaurant and HR gave them a company card, with the only guidance being that it was company policy that there was no drinking during the work day.

    There were about a dozen interns at this lunch. They picked a sushi restaurant and spent over $1k before tip. Three interns also decided that the no alcohol during lunch policy probably only applied if they put the charges for it on the company card, so they ordered beers and started their own separate tab for it. Luckily the one intern I was managing that summer wasn’t one of them, but they all got to attend a seminar put on by HR about professionalism. HR also learned a valuable lesson in clear communication and setting expectations with interns moving forward.

      1. So Many Knopes*

        HR got a hold of the itemized receipt and did the math, it came out to almost $100 per person… before tax and tip… and no alcohol on that one. It wasn’t really that expensive of a restaurant in our mid-size city, probably about ~$15 per roll at the time. They just crazy over-ordered, like they were thinking ‘might as well get enough for dinner too’. My intern told me they all left with to-go boxes.

        1. Nonn*

          If they didn’t put the beers on the company card, how did anyone in the company know?

          1. So Many Knopes*

            I think from what I remember, HR started asking questions when they saw how much they spent. Some of them got nervous and fessed up. I don’t think it was one of the ones that was drinking though.

            1. 1LFTW*

              I can understand assuming that $100 per person probably included alcohol, and asking questions about it.

  43. Anon Intern Nonsense*

    Lawyer here, and have worked with LOTS of summer interns at a few different jobs. Some highlights:

    – The one who would routinely strip down to a bikini and do yoga in her workspace.
    – The one who wore so much cologne you could smell him coming into the building from outside.
    – The one who refused to work on assignments from the female attorneys because he deemed them “scutwork.” The same intern refused to assist with making phone calls (which would have resolved a case quickly for a client) and said, “where I really shine is making arguments in the courtroom.”
    – The one who ended up in federal prison for reasons I won’t say because it would be too identifying. (This one wasn’t a great intern before ending up in prison, fwiw)
    – The one who didn’t follow directions to the office, where we had ample on-site parking. She parked on the street several streets away, and then ran to the office, sobbing, saying she couldn’t find parking. For reasons that are unclear she never parked in our parking lot.
    – The one who passed out because someone sprayed WAY too much febreeze in the bathroom (this wasn’t her fault, but was surely memorable)
    – The one who left during the work day to go get a soda at the local store. He returned 2 hours after the office was closed and could not get back in. Because it was, you know, night.
    – The ones who took a 2 hour lunch every day.
    – The one who left the internship 2 weeks early and informed everyone by sending an email with the subject line, “I’m Peacing Out.”
    – The one who worked on a presentation. The presentation was to be given at an event where dinner was served. When told there would be dinner and that they could choose between a few options, the intern’s response was to complain to the school that they were being bullied because they had to make a choice.

    I’m sure there are more but these are the ones I can think of right off the top of my head. And these were all law students from multiple very good law schools.

      2. Anon Intern Nonsense*

        I know someone said something to the big boss, who pointed out that it was a summer internship, the internship was nearly ending, and that we’d never have to see the guy again. Not satisfying, but also not incorrect. He said he’d say something to the guy about it, but since I mentally declared myself All The Done with that intern, I have no idea if they talked. I later heard the scutwork guy was admitted in a neighboring state (our community is near a state border, so we hear news from both sides of the state line) and had some serious ethical issues and maybe had his license suspended briefly.

    3. goddessoftransitory*

      Complained…about being bullied…because he had to pick a meal option.

      I have taken this guy’s order SO MANY TIMES.

  44. Goddess47*

    I worked as part of a consulting contract that had a (paid) summer ‘internship’ built into the contract. Well, it turned out the CEO planned for his kids to have that job when they were home for the summer.

    One summer it was my turn to supervise the CEO’s kid. They were a good person, hard workings and actually an asset to have. BUT… they would tell ‘dad’ stories that, sometimes, were just a hair away from TMI. But the intern cheerfully told stories about dad that we found fascinating.

    The best story was when the CEO’s wife, ‘mom’ to the intern, arranged for a birthday surprise for the CEO… at the weekly C-suite meeting. The surprise turned out to be a stripper! (What mom was thinking, we never knew!) But the intern skipped down to see the surprise and came back an hour later with all the glorious details. The stripper was introduced by mom as a possible contractor, the music started and the young lady stripped down to her underwear, throwing confetti and sitting in the CEO’s lap. There was a birthday kiss on the cheek, cake presented, and the stripped whisked away by mom. The entire C-suite was stunned and embarrassed by the entire episode.

    We never heard anything about the story from anyone but the intern… it was a closely held “we will never talk about this” event.

    2. Ally McBeal*

      Hoo boy. I thought it was bad when our deputy director hired a drag queen to perform at a birthday lunch for our director. This is so, so much worse.

      1. allathian*

        What’s wrong with drag queens? They’re generally fully clothed.

        One year, our work Christmas dinner (yes, it’s called that, unfortunately) featured a pole dancing performance. Granted, it was the athletic rather than sexy type of pole dancing, no more titillating than gymnastics or acrobatics, but I still thought it was a bit weird.

        1. Ally McBeal*

          Nothing wrong with drag queens in general … I do object to bringing one to the office for a lunchtime performance that’s mandatory for everyone in the department.

        2. Loredena*

          One company early in my career had a social committee plan the very elaborate holiday party each year (fancy dress, sit down dinner, drinks and dancing, rooms rented, employee only). The HR manager one year, despite the committee voting it down, arranged for a special Santa. A (male) Stripper Santa.

  45. cmdrspacebabe*

    This intern came with many stories, but my favourite is the time they discovered they could format not only their Outlook signature, but entire emails. They promptly started sending out all of their emails with a (hideous) clip-art border. After a few rounds of replies stacking up this border, it would invariably distort email threads to the point that they became unreadable.

    We requested that they stop. In response, they called us “haters”.

      1. Watching Paint Dry*

        I spent so much time on clipart, wordart, formatting in middle school… I once got honorable mention for “creativity” in a short story contest because I chose a different font for every character’s dialogue.

      1. allathian*

        Comic Sans gets a lot of unnecessary hate, it’s one of the easier fonts for dyslexics to read, and it makes sense that comics would be printed in such a font. But there’s absolutely no excuse for the pink.

  46. MansplainerHater*

    I was the intern! I worked at a national park, as a natural resources intern, for $15 a day + housing. Being a natural resources intern meant a lot of manual labor. All of us had second jobs or were on food assistance to make ends meet (I folded jeans overnight at The Gap, but that’s a different story). We were all exhausted all the time, and hungry. The park was divided into cultural zones and natural resource zones. Silt and debris washed down a steep hill from a cultural zone into a natural resource zone. On a hot summer day, we were instructed to shovel the soil into wheelbarrows and push it up the hill back to where it came from. After dutifully following instructions for several loads, we decided to dig a big hole in the natural resource zone, dump the soil there and cover it back up. Then we sat in the shade for a while. Whelp, a couple weeks later there were a bunch of wildflowers that had sprouted where we had dug the hole. Flowers that hadn’t been seen in that national park in decades. We had inadvertently exposed the dormant seed bank! We were praised for our hard work, and I later learned that this was actually good ecological practice. Smarter, not harder!

    2. Anxiously autistic*

      !! I love this so much! Do you recall what flowers popped up? I love hearing about biodiversity wins!

  47. IKoala*

    We have a very casual environment however we had an intern show up in jean booty shorts. Don’t worry she brought a large plush throw blanket to wear as she shuffled around the office. So bizarre but the final straw for HR was when she brought in a pack of colored pencils to draw with instead of working. She announced that to the office. Today she would be coloring. It was game over after that.

    1. Green Goose*

      Not interns but at my first office job (I was 24) there were two sisters that got hired a while after me (23 and 21 maybe?) and they both would wear booty shorts to our corporate environment, they’d pair it with a blazer but they were still booty shorts. Our manager was not good at managing so instead of talking directly with the sisters, she had a meeting with a memo that the office was “no longer allowed to wear shorts” which was funny because literally no one else did.
      After the meeting one of the sisters was loudly complaining about how she had wasted money on all those “office shorts” she had bought! lol

      1. ferrina*

        I actually feel bad for the intern. That sounds like no one in her life had talked to her about corporate dress code expectations (maybe they didn’t know?). Meanwhile my mom insisted that I needed to wear a suit to any interview ever. Including the fast food restaurant I worked as a teenager.

        1. UKDancer*

          I did a placement as a law student with a city solicitors firm. I was so glad They actually ran a session for us explaining what to wear and what not to wear. It saved me from making a lot of mistakes as a graduate.

        3. londonedit*

          When I was at school it was standard for everyone in Year 10 (age 15) to do two weeks of work experience – you could do a week in one place and a week in another, or the whole two weeks at one company, but everyone did two weeks at the same time. And that was really good, because the school obviously wanted everyone to make a good impression, so beforehand we were all given advice about how we should dress (no one expected us to have formal business wear, but we were expected to dress appropriately). My school was in a rural area and had a reputation for being a bit rough, and there were quite a few kids from less privileged backgrounds where maybe their parents weren’t working, so it was a really good opportunity to give everyone advice about how to behave in the workplace.

        4. Evan Þ*

          That reminds me of the time I wore a suitcoat to an interview for a software development internship.

          No one commented anything – I’m sure they guessed I was going by well-meaning advice – but I’m pretty sure I was the best-dressed guy in the whole building!

      2. ScruffyInternHerder*

        I kinda feel bad for them, given that (circa 2015) there was a ladies’ professional wear store that sold “Office Shorts” to be worn exactly as you describe them. And friends, I tried on a pair for fun and they were a touch too short on my frame. They were also NOT cheap by any means, this store was $75 for a (linen blend) T-shirt, to borrow from Macklemore slightly.

      3. DannyG*

        Early 2000’s, first day of clinical rotations, had a female come in wearing clubbing clothes, including 4” heels. Turned out these were her only “good” clothes, everything else jeans & t-shirts. We scrounged up some scrubs & shoes for the day and one of the female staff gave her a brief “Dress for Success” hospital/clinic edition briefing as well as directions to the local goodwill store (over the hill from the hospital). After that the school added a professional dress orientation for incoming students.

    2. cmdrspacebabe*

      I had one show up on “casual Friday” in a jean booty-short strapless romper and – best of all – a GIANT straw sunhat, which she wore at her desk all day.

  48. CTA*

    A few tales from the art world.

    1. I used to work at an art gallery. It was a small business and the owner was very straightforward about interns and employees needing to be self-sufficient. For example, all events are required attendance unless otherwise specified. Once for an event, my boss (the owner) asked me to email our intern and ask her to pick up ice. I email the intern and cc my boss. The intern replies back that “no one told her she had to attend” and she had other plans. My boss bluntly replies back that she (the owner) informed her (during interviews and at the start of the internship; verbally and in writing) that all events were required attendance. We’ve had interns forget before. The difference was those past interns would make that mistake early in the internship (like in the first month). This specific intern had been here for over 6 months.

    2. I was freelancing at a non-profit art gallery. The director was the same boss from #1. It was a few years later. This gallery had an intern, but the director told me that I wouldn’t be collaborating/interacting with her. The first day I start working there, the intern tells me that her day ends at 5:30 pm (the gallery was open until 6pm). It felt off, but I didn’t feel comfortable pushing back on it. When the intern did leave at 5:30pm, I texted the director that the intern left for the day and asked me why. That’s when I realized that the intern had f-ed with me. I did try giving the benefit of the doubt because the intern started under a different director and maybe that person let her leave early. The current director said that wasn’t the case. It was a really disheartening experience because I don’t think young people realize that you might encounter people again in the future, so you shouldn’t misbehave. I think the intern though I was a random freelancer and not someone who was friends with the director (her boss).

    1. CTA*

      Adding for #2.

      Later that summer, the intern actually forgot to lock up. One Saturday morning, the director texted me and asked if I had been at the gallery that morning. It was weird because I hadn’t been scheduled that day or the day before. Of course, I said no and I asked why. The director said she showed up and the gallery had not been locked the night before (door not locked, security gate not brought down and locked). They were lucky they hadn’t been robbed or vandalized. I don’t think insurance covers incidents when the intern forgets to lock up.

      2. Loredena*

        In fairness to the second, I’m inclined to think an unsupervised intern shouldn’t be in charge of locking up. The first one though was definitely taking advantage

  49. US-RSE*

    This isn’t as bad as some of the stories… but one of my interns this year said she was so excited about the job that she printed out pictures of all of us to put in the back room of her weekend job at a cafe, so if we ever went in, we would be recognized and treated like celebrities.

    It was… slightly disturbing, mostly flattering, and really ensured I would never go to that cafe.

  50. Not my usual name*

    I was amazed at the intern that told me she didn’t like the heat, two weeks into the summer job as a field tech in south Georgia. I never could understand why she even applied, heat tolerance was listed as a requirement, and we specifically ask about it in the interview.

    I am surprised that in the 10+ years, I only had one intern that could not get used to the sound of gunfire and hand grenades. Their work wasn’t near the ranges but the sound carries.

    Not my intern, but a neighboring department. The intern would park the truck in the woods and nap underneath it. He would tie his hands to the undercarriage of the truck so it looked like he was working on it. He was busted when someone called it in for a possible tow.

      1. Jessica*

        For real! There are quite a few napping stories in this thread. I think Alison should do one of these roundup columns on sleeping at work.

  51. betsyohs*

    We had an intern who typed my name as Besty in every email she sent me over the entire summer. She did otherwise fine work and had minimal spelling errors. But she was only there for ~3 months, so if her plan was for us to become besties, we never got there.

  52. CommanderBanana*

    Most of the interns I have worked with have been pretty unmemorable, but one of our current ones can’t form a coherent sentence. I had a one-on-one with her recently for her to learn about my position and department and I still have no idea what she was trying to ask me.

    1. Green Goose*

      I wonder if she was pushed into requesting informational interviews without them being explained to her. Her manager might have told her to do it and she agreed without any idea of what was expected of her. When I was managing interns there was so much stuff that seemed routine and/or obvious to me and I’d get an intern that did not know about it.

      1. Zweisatz*

        Wouldn’t surprise me. I was certainly floundering when I started my first job and supposed to “get to know” people in certain job functions. Like where to start and also what does that business jargon mean?

    3. Paint N Drip*

      My brother-in-law is like that!! He isn’t like.. totally dumb. He’s a functional person with a job and friends, he has interests and even has some interesting thoughts to discuss. But discussing them raises my blood pressure because WTF ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT???
      I think he has some self-consciousness around being perceived as smart – he uses big words + complicated concepts but so wrongly (lol) and also his basis of knowledge is a mish-mash of actual info, wrongly-articulated true stuff that’s close to actual info, and social media-esque brainrot nonsense. Like I’m happy to discuss conspiracy theory stuff but not when it’s based on the “truth” that microwaves alter water molecules or Alex Jones BS

  53. Green Goose*

    I managed groups of summer interns for four summers. Most of them were good and without incident but of course a few funny experiences. I also learned that I would not want to be someone’s very first manager as there is so much of you-don’t-know-what-you-don’t-know. Here are the most memorable:

    The brunch
    I had to schedule zoom interviews for our summer interns and I allowed them to pick a time. Kyle* selected a time in the early afternoon, 1pm. I logged into zoom at 1pm and…no Kyle. I checked to see if he sent an email or a text but no. So a few minutes past 1pm I sent him a text asking him if everything was alright. He very casually replied that everything was fine and he was just making himself brunch and would log into the zoom after he was done eating.

    The Friend Hang
    One of my first interns, Carl*, had never had an internship or a job previously. I was the very first professional experience he had. He went to an elite university that had a system where classes started ten minutes past the hour. So if a class was a 9am class, it actually started at 9:10.
    Carl had to clock his hours and he started regularly arriving at 9:10 but clocking in at 9, when I told him he couldn’t do that he was genuinely surprised that he was doing anything wrong.
    But the weirdest with him was one day another college aged guy, who was previously involved with our program, showed up and Carl walked over to him and then told me he’d be right back. He disappeared with that guy for about 40 minutes and this was after he had already had a lunch and multiple breaks.
    I had to have a conversation with him about how he needed to ask ahead of time if he wanted a friend to stop by, and that he couldn’t count that time as working hours and I got the shocked Pikachu face.

    The No Call/No Show
    Lindsay* no called and no showed three separate times during her ten week summer internship, and one of those was her very first day. Each time, Lindsay who was glued to her phone normally, said that she didn’t have her phone and it was an emergency. I had talked to the student coordinator about if we should drop her from the program, but as we were part of a nonprofit supporting a vulnerable populations, I didn’t really want to drop her even though the no show/no call was so egregious.
    When I talked to her I let her know that at a normal job she would have been let go, and that it only takes a few seconds to send a text but it obviously never sunk in.

    The Second Job
    During one of the COVID summers, I had an intern Ciara* who definitely had a second job. We were remote and she would just not respond for hours at a time. We talked about it multiple times but it never improved. I couldn’t prove that she had a second job at the time but later on LinkedIn my suspicions were confirmed when she entered in her start date for another job she had. She was the only intern that I would not give a reference for if asked because she really took advantage of a program and took a spot from someone else who could have used the money and we did need the intern support.

    1. Delta Delta*

      I also went to a university where classes started at 10 past the hour, so I get that thinking. Not that it’s correct,
      but I understand the train of thought.

    2. alle*

      I recently had an intern who did something kind of similar to Carl. He took 2 hour lunch breaks and when I told him that was too long, he said: ” But in University,we always had a two hour break between morning and afternoon class!”

  54. Please remove your circus from my monkeys*

    We had a year-long intern through a program that placed interns from a particular European country in US nonprofits that did work related to that country’s history. One of said interns showed up for weekend shifts (9-5, a regular workday that rotated among all staff and full time interns, in a public-facing role) drunk and would sleep it off in a closet. Intern lived in an apartment provided by the org. Over the course of about 8 months, he destroyed a brand new sofa (not sure what he did, exactly, but it was covered in black mold) and did…something that resulted in the bathroom also being so covered in black mold that it had to be gutted. (The European-style stovetop espresso maker—you know the kind—was also packed to the brim with cigarette ashes. Intern claimed not to have known it wasn’t an ashtray.) Intern was removed from both internship and apartment, and org now provides a rent stipend for interns to secure their own housing—including signing their own lease.

      1. Please remove your circus from my monkeys*

        It was definitely more entertaining than the apartment that required a hazmat suit…

  55. Workerbea*

    I worked with an intern at a digital agency once who was very quiet and shy. She was very nice but just wasn’t very outgoing or gregarious…so it made what happened all the more surprising. We were doing a company-wide activity outside at an offsite and she suddenly dropped her very large water bottle by accident, and the top came off. Several of us watched the red wine spill out. Can’t remember if anything came out of it, but it was certainly unexpected.

  56. Liv.Leona*

    I have two favorites.

    The first intern blunder:

    I previously worked for a tiny little ecommerce company. Our summer intern was tasked with researching how to have our company founders run an AMA on reddit. Great, fine. Except, when he first began research, he added an extra letter to the reddit url. Which landed him on a porn site. At work.

    We found out because he turned bright red, slammed his laptop closed, and promptly informed us that he hadn’t meant to look at porn at work.

    The second blunder BY THE SAME INTERN:

    We had a small office in a shared workspace, with one microwave for the 4 of us in this little room. Several of us brought lunch every day, so it was used regularly, and normally wasn’t a big issue.

    Summer Intern was working at a catering company in the evenings, and he would bring in leftovers from events for his lunch. Mostly this was fine. Until one day he brought in leftover lobster tails.

    First problem, this completely stank up the whole room.

    Second problem, I’m allergic to shellfish. I started having an allergic reaction, and had to remove myself from the office, take my epi-pen, and went to the hospital for observation. I was ultimately fine but our poor intern was mortified.

    Our intern manager did sit him down and talk to him about about appropriate use of microwaves and food allergen safety, but it was a formality. He was absolutely terrified that he’d permanently hurt me (which, no, all was good after the epi-pen) and he couldn’t look me in the eyes for the next couple of weeks. Once it was clear I was fully recovered we teased him about it for the rest of his internship.

    Good times. He was a well-meaning kid.

    2. Lady_Lessa*

      Hope the intern does well in his post intern work life. He does sound like a nice person who just had some klutzy moments.

      1. kjinsea*

        Yeah, I feel for him. I was an awkward young adult and this is the sort of thing I’d do, because I was clueless. I got better and I hope he did too.

    3. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

      I had a law school summer clerkship in a government agency, and one of the other clerks typed whitehouse dot com instead of whitehouse dot gov into his browser while legitimately trying to get to the White House site. (We’re talking early aughts here, and the dot com extension was very NSFW.) This was NOT someone being a jerk; he was super shy and was MORTIFIED when the site popped up. That was shortly followed by his screen going blue…followed by everyone’s screens going blue.

  57. Pretty as a Princess*

    We had an intern one year who was supposed to be with us part time for the full academic year, just a couple hours a week. The second term, they just ghosted us. Never responded to email, calls, never showed up again. Assignments left incomplete. Gone. We knew they were ok/healthy/had not dropped out because they kept showing up in the Insta feed for an organization to which I have other connections.

    Two or three years later (pandemic time is weird), about 8 months after they graduated, this person emailed me and one of the project team members with a resume, saying how much they enjoyed their internship and asking if we can refer them to an open position posted in another part of the organization. Their resume included our internship in which… the intern claimed credit for accomplishing the top line technical goals of the project. Not just their tasks (which they didn’t complete), but the whole bloody thing. And listed the internship as running for about 6 months longer than they actually showed up.

      1. Pretty as a Princess*

        I took the easy out and told them that I was unfortunately not involved in any way in the hiring of the positions in question, and that their next step should be to apply to them through our online posting. I know the hiring managers (completely different parts of the organization), so if either was considering this person they would have reached out to ask about our intern experience. I wasn’t contacted.

  58. jg*

    One summer we had an intern that burned popcorn every day at 3pm on the dot. She burned it because that’s the way she liked to eat it and you could set you watch by her consistency. Exactly at 3pm the smell of burnt popcorn would waft over the office.

    1. Ally McBeal*

      Oof. I would’ve insisted that she bring pre-burned popcorn from home – if you like the taste of burned popcorn you probably won’t mind that it’s a little stale.

      1. ferrina*

        This.

        I love popcorn, and for a time that was my afternoon snack in th eoffice. I always brought it pre-popped though. Even the smell of fresh popcorn is so distracting.

    2. Bookworm in Stitches*

      Hate the smell of burnt popcorn. Sadly, my work space is near a shared microwave. Twice we’ve had the fire alarm go off because of burnt popcorn requiring (by law) everyone to evacuate the building and the fire department to show up.

      1. Dog momma*

        …and they get REALLY annoyed if that happens more than once.. large find may be involved.

  59. We Got The Beeps*

    Let’s see – there was the intern who constantly fell asleep at his desk (sitting up and appearing to work) and when confronted would deny it. There was the intern who called everyone by a nickname – even the head of the department. There were the two interns who “were not dating” but worked the same cube and would often sit side-by-side, one resting her head on the other’s shoulder. There was the intern who didn’t seem to know about common things, such as podcasts. There were the interns who decided to climb on the company sign at the building’s entrance (the sign was made of granite or something similar) and take photos of one another. There was the intern who told me he could never date anyone “smarter than him”, to which I almost replied, “I guess you won’t have too many choices”.

    1. New Jack Karyn*

      I have been foolish enough to think that it would be a dandy idea to climb the company sign. Never done that *particular* thing, but I was that brand of fool for a few years.

      1. 1LFTW*

        I can totally imagine some interns who were into bouldering/rock climbing deciding that a granite company sign is basically just another rock face.

        1. allathian*

          Yeah, and my response would be a shrug at best. It’s not as if they can damage the sign by climbing it. And if they hurt themselves, that’s their lookout. But then, my health insurance isn’t dependent on my employer and worker’s comp only covers work-related injuries rather than all injuries on company property. So if you drink too much at a BYOB office party after hours and get injured, the company isn’t liable.

  60. Elspeth*

    Our HR intern had a habit of sending the rest of us emails that included upcoming “holidays” – things like World Juggling Day, National Doughnut Day, etc. A decent amount of us also tended to eat lunch together in one of the office break rooms. I guess one week had National Snow Cone Day or the like. I happened to have a little ice shaving machine so I brought it in along with some bottled syrups and we threw a snow cone party at lunch. Probably not my most professional moment but it was a good bonding experience.

      1. New Jack Karyn*

        Eh, I think the intern was just being a little quirky. If it doesn’t fit the office culture, fine, tell her to dial it down. But a daily “It’s National Adopt a Newt Day!” email is only mildly annoying at worst.

    3. Ally McBeal*

      I disagree, I think it was quite professional – from a team-bonding, “we’re all in the office to ~*~collaborate~*~” perspective. You would’ve been my favorite coworker that week!

    4. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

      I include those in my daily emails to my team and sometimes use them for low-impact work assignments. “Happy National Coffee Day! If you take your coffee black, please work on assignment type A today. If you prefer cream and/or sugar, work on type B. If you’re not a coffee drinker, type C for you!” This is the kind of assignment where usually I’d tell them worker’s choice today, so if someone is working on C instead of A while they, gasp, sip their black coffee, it’s not an issue, just kind of a silly way to change it up some.

  61. KCD*

    One year we had an intern in his mid-20s who had never had a job before. This was apparent on his first day when he didn’t know what a lunch break was or that he was allowed to leave the office for it (when we told him he had an hour he bemoaned the fact that his lunch was actually in his car – parked next to the building). But he quickly figured out breaks were his time and used them to the fullest, to sleep in a work vehicle out in public (promoting government at its finest)! He was a relative of an elected official, so we just had lots of talks about office norms. Not lazy or malicious, just clueless!

  62. SJ Coffee Adict*

    I used to take a 2 hour nap every afternoon in the women’s room at my office when I was an intern. Backstory, when I was a summer intern at a public utility, my position was a “placeholder”, meaning they had an intern project that had been submitted the term before and they were waiting to hear back from management whether it was something they would move forward with. As they didn’t want to lose the funding for an intern, they hired me hoping they would hear back and I would be useful during my term. They did not, so I literally had nothing to do. I helped with whatever tasks they gave me (photocopying, filing), but there wasn’t enough to keep me occupied. I had just moved to a large city for the first time, so I was out late drinking every night, and having discovered a small room off the bathroom with a couch, I would sleep for two hours every afternoon after lunch. My boss was rarely in the office, and no-one ever asked me where I disappeared to every afternoon. Weirdest job ever.

    1. Loredena*

      I was hired as a co-op at IBM early in their PC years for a project that was cancelled in between hiring and start date. My first few days I literally read the manuals for DOS, Lotus, and whatever the slides program was. A few days in a coworker drove me to the mall and told me they’d pick me up in a few hours

      I ended up spending that summer teaching the engineers working on the new PC AT how to use dos and the various software, copying shareware, and the like Great group, strange job!

  63. Nelalvai*

    My old job had two buildings, spread out but you couldn’t get to one without going past the second. The day the intern was supposed to start, he drove past the first building (where he was supposed to work) to the second. Boss at second building says “ah, you must be our intern!” and puts him to work. We spent two weeks wondering where the intern was, and the intern spent two weeks working at the second building. It wasn’t until he repeatedly fell asleep on the job that boss started asking around, realized the mistake, and sent him to us. He was similarly unproductive in our building.
    How did it take so long to correct the mistake? How was the intern reporting time with no one noticing he hadn’t shown up? Why wasn’t this fixed by calling the intern on the first day? All questions I will wonder about for the rest of my life.

  64. CoffeeCoffeeCoffee*

    At my first full-time job about 15 years ago, we hired two summer interns; it was a government org. and the internships were competitive and paid very well comparatively. One was excellent- the other was a young woman with a very distinctive name- let’s call her Feathers. Feathers showed up to her first week of work, but missed Monday of her second week. The office secretary called and her cell phone went straight to voicemail several times and her house line was constantly busy; like it had been left off the hook. She told our VP, who became concerned, knowing that Feathers lived alone, asked secretary to call the police to do a welfare check. The police called back a few hours later and said that Feathers was at home, watching TV and “didn’t feel” like quitting her job. We chalked it up as weird, but since we had a lot of intern apps, replaced her pretty quickly. Two weeks later, our office went out to eat and Feathers was working as a hostess- at the restaurant right next door to our office. We found out later from the restaurant that Feathers also quit that job without telling anyone after a week. A few years later, a group of us were telling office stories at our Christmas party and someone asked whatever happened to Feathers, so we googled her- she is now an amateur porn actress, using her real (and very distinct) name.

  65. Essentially Cheesy*

    I’m so hoping that my own internship experience was forgotten as soon as it was over. I was in my early 20s and so socially clueless. I am sure that the supervisor didn’t like me very much. So glad that was over 25 years ago.

  66. Rainy*

    Many years ago, I was the PI for a grant that managed a population of research internships and early-career jobs, so I was the supervisor for logistic purposes for all of the researchers funded by that grant. This particular intern was an undergrad research intern in a national lab. He turned his timesheets in whenever he felt like it, usually once per term. When I called him in to Have A Talk about it, (it really screws up the grant accounting!) he told me, “Well, it’s not like I need the money–my father is wealthy.”

  67. MissMaple*

    I liked reading the comments on the patio intern. Like a pre-COVID time capsule. I work on the patio at my house, at the office, sometimes at a cafe, all the time; she was just ahead of her time :)

  68. Bruce*

    Speaking of interns: I have a son who just graduated with a BA, and he finds that internships are only open to “current students”. I’ve told him that if he wants to do an internship he may want to enroll in a grad program at least part time so he can be a “current student” again. It is puzzling to me that internships are not open to recent grads, never mind the fact that even when he was a student the internship pickings were slim in his field of the humanities, as are actual jobs. (He has zero interest in being a teacher, to be clear)

    1. Jamie Starr*

      I think being a current student, or within X months of graduation is a Dept. of Labor requirement for paid internships. (At least it used to be.)

      1. Bruce*

        Oh! Interesting. Supports my suggestion to him to look into some sort of graduate classes until he finds his path. Not that I want him to be a perpetual student…

        1. Jamie Starr*

          Just did a little Googling; one of the criteria is that “the internship experience is for the benefit of the intern and their formal education, tying in integrated coursework or receipt of academic credit.” If you’re not a student, there wouldn’t be any coursework or academic credit to get so there you go.

    2. OldHat*

      Because the thought is that he wouldn’t be applying to internship, but jobs in his field. There my not be much, and some fields now have fellowships to help early career.

  69. Ephemeroptera*

    One year, I got an email from a potential internship applicant a couple of months before the submission deadline. He said that he had “too much experience” for a mere internship at my company and wanted to know if it was worth his time to apply, or if he should just wait for a full-time position to open up. I told him that we call former interns first when we have open positions, so if he wanted to work here, and internship was a good way to make that happen. He didn’t reply, nor did he turn in an application by 5:30pm the due date, so I figured he decided not to apply. I came into the office the next day to find he had sent in his application at 11:59pm. When I handed the stack of applications over to my boss to review, I told her that this particular applicant might have some trouble meeting deadlines.

    She ended up giving that guy the internship, and boy he sure did have trouble meeting deadlines. He turned in about half as many assignments as any other intern, turned in many of those late, and mostly spent the day on social media. He was also combative with anyone who tried to give him feedback. It goes without saying that whenever a full-time position opened up, he didn’t get a call.

  70. Bruce*

    In college I had a work-study job in a science team, and for one summer an internship at a science oriented engineering company. I was a smart teen but not a disciplined student, after breezing through high school I was struggling at a very challenging college. I clearly was NOT cut out to be an academic or a research scientist like the people I worked for, but both jobs showed me that I could be a pretty good engineer. I learned to solve problems and make things work, and I got to sit in on some really cool events! I’ve supervised some interns, none who continued on to work for me, but all have moved on to be successful.

  71. Software Engineer*

    The department head at my previous company hired an intern for the summer and said, “they’re smart, they can figure out what to do!” No guidance, nothing. The student had no prior experience with our specific tools and technology stack (e.g., .Net, Visual Studio, and Azure), and the department head assigned him an ambitious project with expectations it be finished in a month. We were also told to provide minimal assistance to the intern.

    After two weeks, the intern had an emotional breakdown in my office. Thus, I had the responsibility to call out my boss on how he was failing to provide the mentorship required and expected from a summer internship.

    Long story short, I got to mentor the intern – and they did well under my wing! – but my boss had to be the smartest person in the room. This was likely one of the reasons why my employment was terminated that following November. It’s always amusing when someone says you’re “too incompetent to be interviewed for a promotion” but yet during the layoff process, says that your skill-set is so advanced that you pose a security risk and that the two-week termination notice will be paid in-lieu.

  72. The Baby Doll*

    I was the weird intern – kind of.
    I interned at a police department, in records, way back when they weren’t electronic yet and people had to input them into the system.

    Anyway, I was still in high school, and my health class had the equivalent of taking care of a sack of flour as if it were a baby, except my school used baby dolls – either ones they gave you, or you could bring your own. Being the girly-girl I am, I already had a doll with its carrier and everything. For a week, I went to work with my doll – because it was my baby and, come on! I couldn’t leave it in the car, that’s child abuse!! LOL

    1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

      Did it cry? I worked for a healthcare org that ran a similar program in schools, and the babies (called Baby Think It Over, lol) were very noisy. Between that and having to fill the pregnancy bellies with like a gallon of water in school restrooms — or, in one memorable case, from the water fountain — I really thought the props for that job were out to get me.

  73. anon for this*

    We work in management consulting in a large metro area and the junior staff liked to take the interns out and be social together. One summer during a night out, one of the interns got drunk and rowdy, ultimately getting arrested for his behavior. The junior staff had to call their manager to get help bailing him out of jail. Needless to say, that intern did not get a full time offer.

  74. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

    I worked for a large company, close to 5000 people at that location. This was in the 90’s and this company was really good about celebrating the employees.

    Our summer interns kept disappearing for hours at a time. We finally figured out that they were attending every celebration in the complex. Years of service parties, retirement parties, promotion parties, achievement celebrations. You name it, they went. The announcements were always sent building wide because there were so many intersecting teams and many people had worked there for decades. A higher than average number of parties were in the summer because of common hiring/retirement months. It was not uncommon for there to be 10-15 gatherings a week

    They were mostly going to score the free food. We were sympathetic to them being poor college students so we finally said they could go for 15 minutes near the end of the scheduled parties, and no more than 1 party per day.

  75. Not That Kind of Doctor*

    Before my worst intern EVER even arrived on day 1, he had the gall to email the head coach the local State Champion football team offering them the “benefit of his experience to elevate their program”. He was insulted that no one messaged him, a random stranger, to take him up on the offer. It was one of many, many shockingly poor choices rooted in an outsized confidence in his abilities.

  76. Cabbagepants*

    A summer intern at my research university was doing research on pathogenic bacteria (don’t remember what variety) and took a live sample on a commercial flight with her.

  77. Applesauced*

    My intern story seems tame in comparison, but anyway….

    I was a summer intern at a architecture firm. They used a software that was not common in the industry, and I didn’t know it (or think I’d ever need it really) so I didn’t work on the software.

    Instead, I worked on projects for my boss’ restaurant.

    He and a friend thought it would be fun to open a restaurant, so they did. Being and architect and a lawyer, they had little to no restaurant experience, but thought they were SO SMART that they woube be fine.

    So they didn’t hire a restaurant manager, and tried to do everything themselves. So he had his interns design the menu. Yes, I know InDesign, but I wasn’t a graphic designer.

    And the restaurant they bought had come with an industrial ice cream maker, so they wanted to package and sell the ice cream. So I designed the packaging for a line of ice creams. And had to fixture out (thanks Google) how to create a nutrition facts label.

    Another random task for the restaurant, he wanted the business cards to be different. The restaurant had subway tile (it was 2008) so he wanted us to stamp hundreds of tiles (by hand, so they all would be UNIQUE) with the restaurant information so he could hand out tiles instead of business cards.

    We (the interns) drew a line when he proposed redirecting the reservation line to the office so he could fire his daytime hostess.

    I worked there 3 days a week, but the office closed at 4 on Fridays for the summer (hours were 8 to 6), and those 2 hrs on Fridays put me below their full/part time break so I was paid the lower stipend.

    I went to the restaurant once with a fellow intern, and I paid full price for my meal. Maybe we were comped a bowl of ice cream.

    The restaurant has since closed, but the architecture firm is still in business.

    1. Applesauced*

      I just looked up the (former) restaurant – they lasted about 2 years, but were closed for a significant part of that for failing to get permits for renovations. THIS MAN IS AN ARCHITECT.

  78. AVP*

    Am I allowed to submit one on behalf of myself? When I was a college intern, I had this amazing job – it paid $13/hr in journalism. I had to write out my hours on a physical timesheet and drop it by my boss’s desk on the other said of the open pen on Friday afternoons.

    Except, I was terrified of my boss, and terrified of walking across the pen, and obviously dealing with some untreated anxiety and adhd. So….I just didn’t do it. I did not submit my time cards for at least 4 of the weeks I was there, and didn’t get paid for them. At one point, a mid-level manager even commented on how they had an unexpected $1k left over in a budget line and she didn’t know why. I think she really didn’t know, but I suspect that was my salary.

    1. ferrina*

      I feel this so hard. I’m ADHD and have anxiety flare ups (cPTSD), and there have been times when I didn’t cash checks because I forgot/got too anxious to do it. I’ve probably lost well over a thousand dollars to this.

  79. WhoKnows*

    I have some crazy, but short, intern stories.

    There was the intern who used to take his shoes off and put his feet up at his desk.

    The intern who fell asleep at a meeting on her first day and then when I asked her about it afterwards just said “sorry I’m just so tired.”

    The intern who I was not-quite-directly told to hire because she was the niece of a high-up executive. She then reported me to HR because I was having her do intern-level tasks and she kept pushing back and I had to insist that this was the work we gave all our interns. She felt they weren’t good enough. She also once asked why you “have” to start in an entry-level position. She then proceeded to get absolutely sh*tfaced at a work event where she was supposed to be helping (the kind of event that many full time staff would kill to have been invited to, very glamorous, and she was supposed to be helping our department assistant). She was under-age and I very explicitly told her she was not allowed to have alcohol as this was a company-sponsored event with press in attendance.

    Thankfully I didn’t hire the first two so these aren’t ALL on me

  80. mskyle*

    This was in just after the disastrous movie Cats had just come out. A bunch of coworkers, including myself and a brand-new intern, were hanging out in the office kitchen talking about our weekends. Intern proceeds to tell us how their friends took them to see Cats that weekend and how, up until the point when they were on their way to or possibly arriving at the theater, Intern thought that their friends were taking them to see small-c cats, the animals (like, at a friend’s house or a cat cafe? I don’t know if this part was explained). They claimed they had never heard of the new movie Cats or the original musical Cats and that they basically saw the film completely cold, with no idea what they were in for (they did not care for it).

    I suppose that could happen to anyone (?) and it’s not really work-related. Later discussions of Les Mis revealed that Intern was actually quite a fan of musicals and I was like, “How could an early-20s person know so much about Les Mis and NOTHING AT ALL about Cats?” but the alternative explanation, that they had made up this story and told it, completely unprompted, during their first week of an internship seemed even more improbable, so I had to conclude that they were telling the truth.

    Anyway Intern wasn’t on my team but they seemed great and competent, just with a surprising Cats-shaped blindspot (and we weren’t, like, a performing arts organization). I sometimes wish I had probed more deeply – was it all Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals or just Cats?

    1. Rainy*

      Thinking (way, way) back to my high school days, I believe it is 100% possible to be a Les Mis enthusiast but know nothing about musical theatre or, indeed, any other musical *except* Les Mis.

      Same with Phantom, actually.

      1. MsM*

        Concur. And I don’t think it’s a popular high school musical, so unless someone had to sing “Memory” for a recital or something, they won’t know it that way.

      2. Quill*

        Rent, Phantom, Les Mis.

        Anything else is wildly dependent on what people around you are into.

  81. NMitford*

    I feel like I’ve told this story before, but…

    Years ago, I worked in a department as a part-time job. The store decided to partner with local high schools to provide work experience for high school students, and they brought in about 10 students to work on Saturdays only helping the sales associates on the busiest day of the week. On the second floor, which was women’s clothing, they brought in four teenagers, two of whom were sisters, and identical twins to boot!

    One sister was assigned to my department (Special Sizes, which was plus and petite) and the other was assigned across the floor to Misses Sportswear. From the start, it seemed like we’d always have to go over to Misses Sportswear, find our intern, and send her back. Misses Sportswear would come over to our area to find their intern and send her back.

    We just thought it was the two sisters wanting to chat with each other. It took us over a month to figure out that only one sister was showing up on any given Saturday, signing in for both of them, and floating back and forth between the two departments.

  82. Finn*

    Have to confess, I’m the intern here…
    After finishing school, the summer before going to study in university, I tried to get an internship. Got super lucky, and got one at pretty much my dream organisation. Think “dreams of building rockets as a job, gets internship at NASA” level dream organisation, wasn’t NASA though. Really hard to get into, through normal ways, they also don’t have a normal school-student internship program (but have one for masters’ university students). I’ve had contact with a HR person for a students day before, and mailed her, she asked her colleagues… And one of them agreed to take me.
    I didn’t have much supervision, and am 99% certain some info on who I am got missed on the way… They put me in a group with masters’ students half of the time, I was in way over my head and didn’t know to ask for help as my boss was not in the office… Boss was always torn between “you know so much already” and “wait how comes you don’t know this”… (I had no clue about the necessary maths etc, but knew quite a lot of the concepts due to having read a ton of things in the field, most of them being addressed at way more experienced people, and getting concepts from there even if I didn’t fully understand everything.)
    I certainly didn’t learn many office norms or anything, learnt a TON about my (back then) field, got a valuable lesson in rose coloured glasses later (the part that I really disliked there would, a few years later, lead to me completely switching my subject in uni, certainly a lesson learnt there as I could’ve seen it coming) and, without me knowing back then, sparked my interest in what I’m studying now.
    (And, V.I., if you read this… I’m sorry for being probably quite a bit of a mess, as an intern.)

  83. Nonprofit Arts Worker*

    At one of my former theaters, our summer intern was given the task of assembling our annual ticket mailing to subscribers. She had to check the name on the envelope against the name on a letter, and then a customer number on the letter against the customer number on the tickets, and make sure all three pieces went together. Reader, she did not. At some point early in the process she skipped a piece in one of the stacks and continued just taking the next item off each stack instead of cross-checking the information, resulting in at least 100 customers receiving someone else’s tickets. We were also one office in a multiunit building that shared an upstairs copy room, and after an awkward complaint from some colleagues on that floor (two floors up and out of our earshot), we also had to explain to the intern why she wasn’t allowed to loudly sing opera selections while making copies.

    1. OrigCassandra*

      I am imagining “Batti, batti, o bel Masetto / La tua povera Zerlina” and wince-laughing.

    2. 1LFTW*

      I wonder if she was hoping to be “discovered” as a singer, while making humble photocopies at her humble theatre internship.

    3. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

      An intern working for an ex of mine (who was, at the time, the ED of a small nonprofit) skipped a letter like that, although it was just a thank-you note. Because it had amounts, though, everyone found out what the person before them in the alphabet had given! A little embarrassing, and they had to re-run like 1,000 letters so people got the right ones for tax purposes. But, at least no one sang opera.

  84. ragazza*

    Once had a really annoying intern at my job at a small publisher who wore a fedora-like hat and brought a fancy walking stick to work (he was in college). He was like a walking J. Peterman catalog. That wasn’t why he was annoying but it didn’t help.

  85. Prudence and Wakeen Snooter Theatre for the Performing Oats*

    First day, the intern was whittling a block of wood (this was an outdoor job, we all had knives, this is not the weird part). Someone asks, hey, what are you making? A wedding ring, he replies. We all say how lovely! Someone asks how long they’ve been engaged? Oh, we’re not engaged, he says. She has a boyfriend, he says, but we belong together. And things did not get less creepy from there, until he was mercifully fired from the internship.

  86. Corvus Corvidae*

    Years ago at my first job, we had an intern named “Ben”. Everyone liked Ben. He was very sweet and hardworking, and truly embodied the spirit of “golden retriever energy”.

    I was working in the lab then, and was having trouble cleaning a fiddly piece of equipment. Ben was familiar with all of the random odds and ends we had in the back room, so I asked him if we had anything like a pipe cleaner. A standard pipe cleaner. A bit of wire covered with bristles or fluff. Anything like that. He happily agreed to help and ran off to check.

    About half an hour later, he reappeared. In his hand, he held… a small Teflon disc, about the size of a quarter.

    I looked at the disc. I looked at Ben. He very earnestly asked me if the disc would be of any help.

    I… I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let him down. I accepted the disc and thanked him, and he trotted away, genuinely thrilled to have helped.

    I don’t remember how I ended up cleaning that equipment, but I still think of poor Ben and his Teflon every so often.

    1. Sharpie*

      Aww, that’s kind of cute. And I knew exactly the sort of person you meant when you described him as having ‘golden retriever energy’. The sort who is extremely earnest and sincyand just wants to help… And ever so slightly completely misses the mark.

  87. I don't work in this van*

    At my first job after being an intern myself (where, btw, the handbook clearly stated interns must wear pants, and that tights were not pants, because of an incident), I inherited an intern. He was mostly fine, except the 2 times he deleted the home page of the website (it was a newspaper, so… kind of important). Two weeks before his internship was up and he could get credit for it, he got in a fight with my boss (whose family owned the newspaper chain we worked for) where he just… way overstepped, and then would not let it go. He spent 2 hours in boss’s office telling him why he was wrong, at which point boss said “you should go home for the rest of the day.” Intern never came back, did not get credit for 8 months of work. After he left, I took over one of his duties that was taking him at least a day, sometimes a day and a half to do. Took me 2 hours.

    1. fhqwhgads*

      I’m surprised he was still eligible for any credit if he deleted the home page TWICE.

  88. Katie*

    I interned with a federal agency with dozens of other interns. I was paid, while the 4 other interns in my department were not, even though we were all essentially doing the same thing. In fact, none of the people I befriended were paid, but two other paid interns were in my onboarding group, so I knew I wasn’t alone. I only told one person I was being paid, but it came out towards the end when a supervisor asked about my timesheet in front of the others. They were… not happy. I never did figure out why I was paid – I was in law school, but it wasn’t a legal internship and others were in grad school.

    1. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

      Yikes! I’m hoping it was because they were getting school credit — and learning things — relevant their degrees and since you were not, they had to pay you.

  89. see you anon*

    This is not unique, but this always makes me chuckle when it happens, while also making me feel my age (I’m in my mid-30s).

    Last week one of the summer interns from one of the research labs came to my team’s office asking about a fax machine, as she needed to be sent something. I showed her where it was, and left it at that. She then asked how it worked, because she had never used one before. This is very reasonable, as they were on the way out in terms of technology when I was growing up, but it still makes me laugh when I need to explain a fax machine to someone.

    1. I take tea*

      I know what you mean by old technology. I work in an academic library and am one of the few who knows how to work the microfilm machine. I sometimes have to begin by explaining what it is and how it works in general, before showing how to put it in properly. I used to talk about old spy thrillers, now I use Stranger Things as an example. (Although that scene made be a bit annoyed. They begun good by showing that it take time, but then they do the “twirl and find what you are looking for” anyway…)

  90. DameB*

    We had a steady stream of Ivy League Interns who would show up and on their first day be given a simple copyediting job: “Here, read this, mark up typos only, widows, or orphans.”

    And then they’d return it covered in red ink, including editorial ‘suggestions’ and edits that were violations of the style guide.

    1. Siege*

      I had a job candidate who did a proofing test (it’s a major component of that role’s work) complete with a long diatribe about gendered pronouns and insertion of a bunch of passive voice. I don’t even disagree about the gendered pronouns, but the fact that it was delivered as a diatribe was completely inappropriate, and also we didn’t ask your opinion on whether this just didn’t have enough passive voice in it. AND she missed several factual errors, like a date reference that was actually crucial.

      We hired her anyway on the grounds that we can teach some level of editing skill, but somewhat unsurprisingly she lasted less than a month before she gave notice and THEN explained to her boss everything that was wrong with the organization as though we would take this feedback on board, fix it all (for a dysfunctional organization, she was surprisingly off the mark on a lot of her critique and some of the things she was upset about are legal requirements) and try to keep her.

  91. LophDungren*

    Oh. This is my current intern. She has been fantastic. We’ve really enjoyed her, but she has this kinda weird obsession with drawing cartoon penguins everywhere. Her office mate and her have a wall that we painted with the dry-erase paint. It started off as one really cute one drawn in colored dry-erase that is wearing like a hat and scarf and he had a name by it like “Alfred”. Then it multiplied to another. Then when she started visiting people in our team to help on assignments, she would come back in secret and draw a penguin on a board or leave a sticky note on their desk that was doing something and it would have its own name and doing an activity. Some of the boards in the conference rooms get little penguins like saying safety slogans.

    Most people kind of shake their heads at it. Some people have started participating and poking fun at her in a nice way. One guy that’s in his 50’s and is kinda geeky started like coming up with this weird serialized comic about some kind of penguin friend adventures. It was kinda cringy on his part, but she does great work and is an overall delight.

    2. Admin of Sys*

      aww, I like that! In my previous job, we had a giant white board in the break room and took to drawing stick figure stories on it. I miss that sometimes, though wfh is super nice.

  92. mini_pixie*

    I’m in payroll, so I’ve seen a few intern issues here and there. My two favorite are both pay related:
    – Interns get younger every year, and of course are still learning about things that some of us take for granted. We had an intern last year whose direct deposit kept getting rejected by the bank. I would get a notice and reach out and ask them to fix the account number and we’d try again. I reviewed the inputs and it mostly looked ok- of course a Routing number is a standard length, but an account number is not so I wasn’t sure what the issue was. After like 3 rejections, I asked them to come and show me how they were setting it up. They showed me where the on the bank website they got the Routing number from, and then for the Account number, they pulled out their debit card. They’d never had a checkbook at all! Thankfully we were able to get itthe correct number located and the deposit finally went through.
    – The large tech company I used to work for had interns constantly, not just for summer, and many worked for quite long periods. They were paid pretty well, though. We had an intern reach out after nearly a year to ask what had happened to their pay. After doing some digging, it turned out they had typo’d their direct deposit account information by a digit, and it had been going to some other person the whole time. Unfortunately because it was a real account, the deposits went through fine and the bank never reported any issue. I had to tell this kid that they’d have to contact the bank about the year’s worth of missing money – there is literally nothing we could do as the employer to try and get it back. I always wondered why it took them so long to notice!

    1. Rainy*

      I used to hire student employees, and they had to call their parents and ask to have their social security card sent overnight to them so much more often than I thought should be the case. Occasionally the conversation would go in really surprising ways.

      People: when your kids start working, they need their social security card. Stop keeping it at your house in another state.

      1. Archi-detect*

        Counterpoint: see all the other terrible to silly blunders in the thread lol. you’re right but I remember how I was in that time with critical documents including a washed passport

        1. Songbird121*

          I’ve often had to bring the actual card and it would get photocopied or scanned to be included as part of the personnel file. My partner just got a new job and they didn’t need his SS card but that’s largely because he submitted his physical passport instead.

    2. Evan Þ*

      Totally unsurprised by #1. I volunteer with the IRS VITA free tax prep program, and I’ve had a lot of clients who ask to get their tax refund by direct deposit and then pull out their debit card to get their account number.

      We keep a list of popular local banks and their routing numbers, but we can’t do anything to help people who can’t find their account number except give them the choice of getting a check in the mail (which takes several weeks longer) or coming back later in the week with an actual account number.

  93. DEEngineer*

    The weird thing is that I keep forgetting that I had a research internship the semester before I started college where I injected male guinea pigs with hormones over several weeks, and then put them in a small bin with a female guinea pig in heat and scored their mating attempts. I say attempts, because none of the 6 males figured it out. Then I’ll remember it all over again – oh yeah, I had an internship where I scored guinea pig sex. There was a hypothesis and it was real science, but when I got older I began to doubt the applicability to anything important.

  94. Lou's Girl*

    Too many! But here are my favs:
    The 2 interns that were caught smoking marijuana at work, during business hours. When caught, they stated that since they were 1- on break, it was ok, they were after all in the smoking section, and 2- originally from a state where it was legal, so they were covered in this state as well (spoiler- they were not, it was still illegal in our state). They were both let go.

    Different intern, different company- she was caught being ‘inappropriate’ with a student volunteer. At work. In the office. During office hours. She was 24, he was 17. She quit immediately when brought to HR.

    Another intern was brought on to handle the social media (when it was newish). She created pages for our little nonprofit complete with her personal photos of her in bathing suits, her drinking excessively, her making out with people, etc. She did not understand why this was inappropriate for our company page. She was not let go, but did have to remove the photos. She kept saying that ‘this was what people wanted to see…’

    1. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

      2- originally from a state where it was legal, so they were covered in this state as well

      I swear, this is why people get arrested in other countries — because they think only the laws of their country of citizenship apply to them. (massive eyeroll)

      1. New Jack Karyn*

        My partner–a mature, intelligent, knowledgeable woman–mentioned stopping by our local cannabis shop before she took a trip to Mexico.

        I do not make a habit of telling to do something, or not do something, but that day I looked her dead in the face and said, “Do not try to take weed into another country.”

  95. Space Cadet*

    I worked with an intern, “Chad”, who told a packed breakroom (the entire 8 – person company was there, owner included) that in a woman-run society we’d all be living in caves, because skyscrapers are phallic.
    He didn’t last the summer.

  96. I don't know why*

    This is so minor but I watched an intern order and drink a very large glass of whole milk at a coffee shop meeting with management. Not an inherently bad thing to do but it was so so memorable of a choice.

    2. Ess Ess*

      Not seeing the odd thing about this. Several religions do not allow drinking coffee, so that would be a normal alternative when having a coffee-shop meeting that severely restricts options.

      1. I don't know why*

        It was more so the quantity and speed of milk consumed. Like I said, not a bad thing, just stuck out to me. And this coffee chain serves many non-coffee/non-tea options (smoothies, juices, blended drinks, etc).

      2. Malk*

        Nothing wrong with it at all, but it’s definitely unusual. I’d more often expect someone in a business meeting who doesn’t do coffee/caffeine to have herbal tea, water, seltzer, soda, even juice. Milk is just very culturally connected to childhood, and that’s underscored when a young intern makes that choice in the context of a business meeting.

    3. Paint N Drip*

      Something about that is so endearing, if I met someone ‘for coffee’ and they ordered a big-ass milk.. hilarious and cute and definitely memorable.
      IDK if it’s just my dairy intolerance but there is also something possibly sinister about that choice lol like that person is a force of nature that I might not want to tangle with

  97. SummitSkein*

    Just a heartwarming one from me, but we’re still riding the tails of it. I work in a criminal defense office and we always do our best to get an intern a chance to at least sit second chair at a trial, but it doesn’t always work out. This year, our intern not only got to do a trial, but he got to do it as first chair – and he got a Not Guilty! Super talented young man and we’re excited to see his career blossom.

  98. Elspeth*

    When I was an intern, our HR department would decorate a wall of cubicles in our home office with photos and fun fact sheets about all of the summer interns. We’re in a fairly conservative industry and had a business casual dress code at the time. One year, one of the male interns apparently wore a hemp necklace on the day his photo was taken. Our head of HR noticed it in the photo and threw an absolute fit over it. He demanded that the photo be taken down and that a new photo be taken to replace it. I guess he saw it as unspeakably unprofessional. I have to imagine it would go down differently today, as our company culture has relaxed quite a bit since then.

  99. Tradd*

    My company (freight forwarder) doesn’t do interns. However, a college junior who turned out the be the son of a friend of the owners was supposed to intern with us last summer. It was supposed to be a few day a week. Guy was supposedly a supply chain major

    Anyway, kid starts and he is pretty much clueless on basic MS Office stuff such as Outlook email and Word. He could barely do an email. When he did one, he wrote like he was texting, complete with text shorthand and emoji attempts. I asked him to call an airline to get some shipment information and he just started shaking. He had a severe phone phobia. Can’t handle phone calls at all. The airlines had much more on email than they used to be, but you still have to call sometimes.

    We had him sit with me for a while so he could see what clearing shipments through customs would be like (I’m a customs broker). He had no questions. Never said anything. Not a single spark of curiosity.

    We ended up having a talk with him. He wasn’t able to even help the sales department with sending emails out for them since he couldn’t write and was barely able to send emails out. I recommended he take a business software and communications class. As well as online classes for MS Office. I was later told the kid’s father was kind of embarrassed by what happened. We never saw the kid again.

  100. outoftown*

    A few years ago, I had to be out of town for a family wedding for few days toward the end of my intern’s summer with us. They were well into their various projects by then and had access to our office, network, etc. Just in case, my boss gave the intern his cell phone number in case the intern had any questions (super nice so that I didn’t have to be on call). Everything in the office proceeded as usual, but then one night my boss did get a call from the intern…

    The intern had used public transportation to get to a state park at least 20 minutes from where they were staying for the summer, and was now stranded and needed a ride. My boss lived 40 minutes from our office and wasn’t able to do the long round trip to ferry the intern home, so he called another coworker who lived right near by and asked him to do it. Apparently they sat in silence all the way home. I still don’t know why no one thought of Uber or why my intern thought that was an appropriate “just in case” kind of call — but we still get a laugh out of that.

  101. RLC*

    Intern came to work one morning with a full head of very retro hair rollers and wore them all day. This was not a hairdresser’s, it was an engineering office. Not sure if their supervisor said anything to them, but it didn’t happen again. There were certainly many puzzled and amused stares from staff members walking past intern’s desk.

  102. SadPenguin*

    Oh. My current intern is interesting. She has been fantastic, but she has this obsession with drawing cute cartoon penguins on dry erase boards. The first one came on their office wall that has dry erase paint. It started out as like one that was wearing a little scarf and hat. They always have a name and they are doing some kind of activity like holding an umbrella or jumping rope. As she has helped other members on the team, she sneaks into their office to draw a unique penguin for that team member on a board or sticky note. Our conference rooms even get like little penguins saying safety slogans. There are dozens at this point all over our offices. Interesting to explain when our boss’s bosses come around. We usually just get a head shake.

    Other folks have started getting in on the fun with her. One guy that is a pretty big geek in his 50 has been making this weird serialized comic book about these penguin friends that are going on an adventure. Kinda cute, but a bit cringy on his part. Overall, she has been a delight and we love her.

    1. CR Heads*

      I love things like that – it shows in some offices it’s ok to be a little lighthearted. Even better when someone new comes in and others follow the lead

  103. Dovasary Balitang*

    Considering how often interns are poorly paid or unpaid, and frequently have less work experience than the average commenter, I find soliciting for embarrassing stories about them to be in poor taste.

    1. fhqwhgads*

      It doesn’t have to be embarrassing to be weird or hilarious. Especially since a bunch of folks are telling stories about themselves as interns.

    2. What_the_What*

      These aren’t stories of interns trying hard and just not getting it; these are specifically geared towards the outliers who are probably ding dongs regardless of their intern status. Alison ALSO said “heartwarming stories,” too soooo maybe turn down the righteous virtue signalling, eh?

      1. New Jack Karyn*

        There are a few stories in here of interns trying hard and not getting it. We can all relax a little.

    3. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

      Eh, I can see how this could’ve gotten mean, but it really hasn’t. Many of the stories are positive, everyone’s avoiding using identifiers, and there are tons of comments by people who were the silly interns themselves. This strikes me as harmless, and I’m usually sensitive af.

    4. Physics Lab Tech*

      idk Dove was 13 when she started ruling so not sure that age always has to do with some of these stories.

  104. Suzzee*

    My intern story is very mild compared to most of these. I had one very nice fellow, who just seem to know much of anything despite the fact that he was in an MBA program. He often asked questions that indicated his lack of knowledge in common things, but the one that really threw me off was when he asked why we had sales people, I had to explain to him that most companies sell a product or a service and they need people to contact other businesses that may want to purchase it, and not just wait for people to contact us. Yeah

  105. Intern dumpster fire*

    I have a few fun ones.

    One intern I’m convinced was a mole for the great great grand boss. He would call her personal cell phone and ask who was in the office. She would go around and name everyone who was there at the time (we don’t have a job tied to desks all day). She was the only intern to receive a uniform, complained why there wasn’t an option for shorts and said “these uniforms just don’t look good on OUR body type.”

    Another one fainted on me. I had to call for EMS. When she came to, she didn’t want medical help, just chocolate ice cream.

    One wasn’t even interested in the work I do. He just needed some sort of internship for credit. Asked if he could play on his phone instead of learning my job. I told my boss and said I’m not wasting my time on this guy. so he played games on his phone all day.

  106. SeaGirl*

    This was about 20 years ago before a lot of us realized how pervasive and lasting the internet would be. One of my interns showed me the other intern’s Facebook page. The very first photo was of her upside down drinking beer from a keg in a bikini. In the next photo, she was passed out drunk, mouth agape. When I showed it to her on my work PC, she was horrified. It was easy to persuade her to lock down her page.

  107. Ally McBeal*

    I supervised an intern a couple years ago who was a relatively tall woman. I am an objectively short woman. She arrived on her first day and I said hello from my desk before she was swept off for HR/IT onboarding. When onboarding wrapped, she came back to my desk, which I had moved from seated to standing position, and her first reaction (again, the first words we’ve spoken to each other beyond “hello/welcome”) was “Okay short queen!!!” While a tad unprofessional, that comment will always make me laugh, but because I’m so short I will likely never have a reason to use that phrase on someone else :(

  108. LadyByTheLake*

    Years ago, in BigLaw, we had a summer intern who did the following:
    1. I took him to a court hearing out of town. On the long drive he informed me that he didn’t approve of women working and that he hoped that I was looking for a husband so that I would stop working.
    2. He told several senior partners that he didn’t do research because he was more of an “Ideas Man.” His job was to do research.
    3. At a work happy hour he threatened a waiter because the waiter had joined in some joking commentary at the table. He (the most junior person) pulled the “do you know who you’re talking to, have some respect” line. The rest of us were mortified, assured the waiter it was all good, told the intern to leave, and gave the waiter a huge tip.
    4. He routinely tried to foist off his work on paralegals, secretaries and the firm librarians since he felt the work was beneath him. When forced to do it, he (of course) couldn’t.
    5. When the firm declined to extend him a permanent offer, he claimed it was due to anti-Semitism. That was confusing because he wasn’t Jewish or any other kind of Semite.

    1. Irish Teacher.*

      I want to believe this intern is the LW who some years ago wrote to Alison to ask about getting hired as an “Ideas Man.”

  109. fish*

    Nothing too exciting, but I had an intern who took all summer to painstakingly turn in a one-page document, clearly written by ChatGPT, that reduced down to three bullet points.

    He insisted it was *not* written by ChatGPT, which just makes it worse.

    And yes, this was with regular supervision, oversight, and coaching.

  110. MarissaW*

    Not exactly an internship, and definitely not the student’s fault, but I used to work at a local community organization that did a lot of landscaping/yard maintenance on vacant or publicly owned lots and houses. There was a summer youth jobs program that asked if we could use anyone from the local high school that summer, my boss thought the landscaping crew could be a good opportunity for some of the kids. One of the kids they sent was 8 months pregnant. She was perfectly nice and we were able to find some office work for her to do, but my boss never accepted anyone from that program again.

    1. Gullible Vengeance Umpires*

      Ooh, the volunteer who thought she was untouchable but started all kinds of drama and was taking liberties with her role (she was acting as purchaser for a volunteer-run gift shop). I had to sit her down about some of the drama. 30 years my senior, she says to me, 23 yr old volunteer coordinator, “Well, maybe I should just resign then.” And I got to say, “Yes, I think that would be best.” Biggest shocked pikachu face I’ve encountered in the wild.

  112. Jen*

    Years ago I had an intern who wore the same pair of pants for his entire internship. His logic was that it was better to wear out one pair of pants than to have wear and tear on several pairs of pants. He wasn’t shy about explaining this, and he vigorously defended this logic to anyone who asked him about it. At the end of his university-coordinated internship we invited him to stay on for a few more months and he responded with enthusiasm for continuing with us, but disappointment because he was ready to toss his internship pants — he’d just have to keep them for a few more months.

    Also, worth noting his dad was an executive at a Fortune 10 company, so this didn’t seem to be a financial issue. Nor did his role require specialized attire…he was in an office doing white collar kind of work, so it wasn’t a case of clothing possibly getting stained, torn or otherwise damaged. And we didn’t have an onerous dress code (or, quite possibly, any kind of dress code at all — I know people wore jeans).

  113. Anon for this*

    The interns who told me (a security professional) that as the Internet of Things takes over, no one will need to worry about security anymore.

    1. Siege*

      Well, I just turned into the blinking meme.

      I guess if you want your smart fridge to run a botnet for a hostile power, or feel like you must have smart socks so you can track them by GPS when the washing machine eats them, that’s a personal choice, but it’s not a good one.

      1. Abogado Avocado*

        If my fridge ever is co-opted by a hostile power I predict said power will become even more hostile once it learns that, while my fridge can make ice and store ice, it can only keep the ice cream in a mushy state.

    3. Admin of Sys*

      I mean, maybe the theory is that everything is definitely compromised at that point, so why bother fighting it?

      1. Anon for this*

        I have no idea but I casually pulled out my phone and texted my boss to confirm that they were NOT going to be working with us after they finished their rotating through the different departments to see what we can do.

        apparently security is not a concern in an IoT world, but please don’t ask me for an explanation because their answer on that front was “it’s just not”

  114. Human Embodiment of the 100 Emoji*

    Oh boy, do I have a doozy.

    We had an intern last summer who has become the benchmark for “bad intern” in our organization. Let’s call him Carl. Carl was apparently a terrible roommate (our interns live in a shared dorm) who kept stealing food, barely did any work, and frequently used government vehicles to do personal errands (HUGE no-no). But the real defining event was when he attended our village’s monthly book club. Book club is normally a super milquetoast event where we sip wine and eat cheese and crackers. Well, apparently Carl the barely-twenty-one year old saw free wine available and started chugging like his life depended on it. And we found out he had been drinking alcohol at the community pool for hours before book club started. So about halfway through book club, Carl just starts projectile vomiting all over this employee’s house. We all thought the kid was gonna die there was so much vomit, but an hour later, after emergency services arrived, he stopped vomiting, perked right up, and the emergency services drove him back to his dorm. The homeowner had to spend two hours cleaning up the leather chair where he was sitting when he started vomiting.

    Oh, and the best part? When he saw the employee whose house it was the next day because he had left his backpack at her house, he said he was “sorry if he had spilled any wine and made a mess”.

    1. allathian*

      At least he had the good sense to apologize! I suspect the mess referred to the vomit.

  115. Destra N.*

    A long time ago, we had a team dinner that included a new summer intern. It was a Mexican place, and someone ordered a round of flaming shots. One of them spilled while still lit, and the intern reflexively tried to put it out but got flaming alcohol on her hands instead. Thankfully she wasn’t hurt, but for years we all joked about that one time we set the intern on fire.

  116. Magnus Archivist*

    I definitely remember the intern who overhead me mention Beavis & Butthead (in a work-appropriate way — I think we were just being nostalgic about the 90s) to a colleague, and excitedly emailed us both a link to his Beavis & Butthead fan art on Deviant Art. It was…not great.

  117. Support human*

    This was not my intern, but an intern story I was told as an intern. There was an intern who had the best intentions but did things you should never do in a chem lab. The incident I was told about was the day she had taken a concentrated acid and poured it into a concentrated base in order to neutralize it before disposing of it. Apparently holes were burned in ceiling tiles that day.

    (The chemists told us this story in answer to the question “how’d we do as interns” asked by my fellow summer intern. Their response was, “well you weren’t the *worst* interns we ever had, here’s some stories.” That did not inspire confidence in our performance, although my rehire the following year allayed those fears.)

  118. Elle Woods*

    A friend worked at a company that did business around the state of Minnesota. One summer, they hired an intern from a southern state. One of the things the intern got tasked with was making hotel reservations for meetings requiring an overnight visit. It never occurred to either the intern or the employees that they needed to specify Minnesota as the state in which the reservations needed to be made. A couple of employees wound up Duluth, MN without a hotel reservation because the intern had made them for a hotel in Duluth, GA. The intern also made hotel reservations for Austin, TX instead of Austin, MN but at least they caught that one well before the trip occurred.

  119. Heffalump*

    The intern who set up a cot–I can see why the manager would be annoyed, but why epic and horrifying rage, as the OP phrased it?

    1. What_the_What*

      IKR? I’d have been bemused and like, “you…can’t do that at work. Please remove it,” and then go to my private office and laugh til I cried, I think! Rage wouldn’t even cross my mind!

  120. Watching Paint Dry*

    Once upon a time I interned at a paint factory.

    Among my duties (mixing paint, applying paint, measuring color of paint, literally watching paint dry) was maintaining a machine that needed to have a 100+ gallon barrel of water added to it every few days. One sat the barrel (on rollers) under a spigot, wait for it to fill (20 or 30 minutes) and then wheel it down the hall, stick a pump and hose into the barrel, and wait for the water to be pumped into the machine. (another 20 or 30 minutes)

    I, being gloriously efficient, decided that instead of standing around supervising a glorified hose, I would go mix an “easy” batch of paint in those first 20 minutes, since the process of gathering ingredients and setting the mixer up usually took about 18 minutes, give or take.

    45 minutes later, after a comedy of errors including:
    – a series of unforeseen minor spills
    – cleaning up
    – discovering that I did not have the arm strength to lift a full 50 gallon bucket
    – cleaning up
    – having to find someone to consult on why the mixer was not mixing
    – cleaning up
    – realizing this was taking longer than anticipated but believing I still had 5 to 10 minutes of fill time left, and writing a note to tape to the mixer that I would be back in just a second

    … I heard footsteps running past and a fateful exclamation of “IT’S RAINING IN PRODUCTION!”

    Readers. My spigot and barrel were above production. I ran towards them with everyone else in the department and discovered that my calamitously full barrel was sitting in three inches of water next to a murkily nonfunctional drain with the spigot going FULL BLAST from both its front and sides while vehement swearing echoed through the concrete floor from below, where everything was being moved out of the raining ceiling by forklift.

    1. Watching Paint Dry*

      I was not fired.

      The spectacular failure had, in addition to my own stupidity, been caused by

      1: the overflow timer on the spigot had broken off (it was only supposed to let 100 gallons of water through before turning it off. I was not aware of its existence but I was also not the only one to leave the spigot unsupervised, ever.)
      2: A well intentioned “repair” by way of screwing it back on had made the partial pressure back up into the spigot, with water busting through at every seam.
      3: The drain, never used, had accumulated a fine layer of drywall dust from recent remodeling, which had turned to instant cement when the water had hit it, leading to the utility room’s transformation into an indoor pool.

      Nonetheless, I spent the next month literally timing how long it took paint to dry.

      1. New Jack Karyn*

        This is why industrial and medical safety teams do post-mortems. Every huge accident likely had at least three points of failure leading up to the major incident.

        1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

          50 gallons? There are people who can lift this much — 400+ lbs — but unless you’re a serious lifter, I’m glad you weren’t hurt trying to do that. I made a big mess just flipping one of those 5-gallon water jugs (40lbs) over at work once!

          1. Watching Paint Dry*

            I’m not sure I remember exactly how many gallons it was, but I could scoot it about an inch, not lift it… so maybe 60 pounds?

  121. Unusually Short*

    When I was in high school, we had a student teacher (a college internship required to get a teaching credential in my state). He taught our classes while our regular teacher was in the room to help him learn the ropes. One day he disappeared, even though he was supposed to be there the whole semester. Our regular teacher later told us he’d made multiple derogatory jokes to another class period about how “unusually short” our regular teacher was, along with other comments about her appearance, IN FRONT OF HER! She’d sent him home and told him to finish his internship with another teacher!

    Even as a high schooler this was seared into my brain as a way NOT to behave in an internship. Ten years later I still think about the audacity of that guy!

    1. CubeFarmer*

      Wow!

      We once had a student teacher in my sophomore history class who announced that he was a law student and was only getting his teaching certificate in case he wasn’t able to pass the bar. I cannot for the life of me remember this guy’s name, so I can’t look up whether or not he actually managed to become a lawyer ever.

  122. HB*

    At my old office we had a young man interning with us who was very nice, but not exactly… sharp – either when it came to the work we’re doing, or to basic social interactions. This was mostly fine as what we had them doing wasn’t rocket science anyway (though very critical to our job), but the biggest problem with him was he just would not wash his hands after using the restroom. We had separate single occupancy bathrooms for men and women (not relevant to the story but they were also carpeted… I was very happy to leave that office for my new one), and the men’s restroom was across the hall from a friend of mine. And it’s not like she was listening, but she could hear when the toilet flushed, and she could also hear the sink IF it was being used. It never was. He wasn’t asked back the following year which was quite fortunate for us since that’s the year the pandemic started.

    And this person wasn’t an intern… but the year of the pandemic we had a seasonal contract employee through a staffing agency. We all liked her and she did great work, but she had a trip planned for New York City around the middle of March. The firm’s owner told her that if she went on the trip, he was going to have to terminate her contract. Essentially the issue was that he wouldn’t be able to let her back in the office for at least two weeks afterwards, at which point there was only a week or two left in busy season (we had some WFH capability, but our processes were such that you basically had to come to the office at least once every couple of days so going fully remote for that period wasn’t an option). She went, and he kept his word and let her go. While there were a number of dysfunctional things about that office, the seriousness of the owner’s approach to the pandemic was not one of them.

  123. Noncompliance Specialist*

    I supervise grad student interns for a semester at a time. My worst intern left for a remote country for an entire month without telling me beforehand. It wasn’t *that* much of a problem in some ways, because we had tasked her with research assignments that required almost no in-person work. But she was in an opposite time zone and in an area with patchy internet, so it was super frustrating to work around those limitations, and she just seemed totally shocked that I would take issue with it. I also found out that she plagiarized some of the materials she developed for us. She did however, have enough judgement to not ask me for a letter of recommendation at the end of it.

  124. UpstateDownstate*

    I had an intern that would frequently take off her shoes and walk around in her bare feet. She didn’t have to interact with clients or the public but her supervisors and coworkers were extremely fashionable so this freaked them out quite a bit (and there were tools around so there was additional concern of those falling on someone’s feet which is why the dress policy had a ‘no open shoes’ rule).

    Anyway, I had to talk to her about this multiple times and each time she said that she was ‘hot,’ and the only way to cool down was to take her shoes off but that she’d do better going forward (she did not).

    I also had the usual ‘why is our intern braless,’ or ‘why is our interns skirt so short,’ and ‘our intern is wearing a totally backless and braless top! help!,’ and so I always had a black cardigan, shawl and long skirt at the ready to loan out.

  125. postdooc*

    A few years ago in an academic lab we hired an undergraduate intern (Holly) for the summer. Holly was a good intern and did good work throughout the whole summer. She also had the BEST stories. Holly worked at a premiere strip club in our city as a bottle girl, and was very clear that this internship (and her college degree) was to set herself up for a career after she had to retire from the clubs. Her goal was to get a boob job and move to Miami until she was ‘no longer hot’ and then move back and work in IT. Honestly, we were all super impressed that she was able to balance both jobs very well (I don’t know how she was working and cheery 8-4 every day in our lab, while also working late nights at the club). She would share stories from the club at lunch, including photos of her with different celebrities at the club.

    We had a party for the whole lab at the end of the summer, and Holly brought a very nice bottle of tequila, and poured shots into everyone’s mouth (including the senior faculty members and government collaborators). Every other person in the lab was way too hungover to go to work the next day, with the exception of Holly, who cheerfully worked her entire day. Absolute legend. I hope she is doing great, and she’s always got a letter of rec if she needs one.

    2. Paint N Drip*

      You know what, I don’t think Holly will need a recommendation letter! I think she will fly by her own wings all the way to the top and I love that for her

    3. not my usual self*

      The interesting part about this for me is that when I was an undergraduate research assistant I had a co-worker much like Holly, so much so that I was wondering if this was describing the same lab, but it wasn’t IT she was going into as a future field, so I guess there are more “Hollies” than one might expect!

  126. It's Marie - Not Maria*

    One company I worked at for a short time had an HR Intern, who was assigned to be supervised by another member of the HR Team, so “they could get experience managing people.” This other member of the HR Team was a well-known flake, but also the pet of the VP of HR, so no one said a word.

    It went about as expected. The Intern was tasked with scanning paper HR Files and uploading them to the correct folder Confidential Shared Drive. Once shown what to do, the Intern went for it, doing exactly as they were shown. Except instead of uploading the files to the correct folder on the Confidential Shared Drive, they were shown to upload these files to a folder with the same name on the General Shared Drive. (Of course, flakey other HR Team member never bothered to check on this, even though it should have been obvious to anyone on the HR Team, because things like that had happened in the past.) Fast forward to a Midnight shift in the company’s 24 hour operation, and a Team Lead on midnights found these files in the General Shared Drive. Absolute Chaos ensued as people were horrified to find their personal personnel information out for public view. Many files were deleted in employee’s attempts to remove their personal information from this public folder.

    I walked into pandemonium that morning. Everyone was blaming the poor Intern, who had only done as they were shown. The VP of HR was trying to find anyone they could blame for this kerfuffle except for their pet who had been supervising the Intern, since it really wasn’t the Intern’s fault. Word got around they were trying to find a way to blame me for it (Hooray for having created a good working relationship with the CFO the short time I was there!), when I had absolutely nothing to do with it! I decided to go scorched earth, and sent a delayed delivery email to the President of the Company, ccing the VP of HR, telling the President exactly what happened, and outlining the VP was trying to blame me for it – when I had zero to do with it. I then went to lunch and never came back. I heard later the blow up between the President and the VP of HR was glorious and the VP was gone shortly afterwards. They wisely did not take any actions other than give coaching to the Intern.

  127. slr*

    I did several internships throughout university, my last at a big tech firm. My boss asked me to take a meeting for him with a charity that was looking for funding from us. Halfway though the pitch, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d met the person presenting before. And then it dawns on me: he was fired from the last workplace I interned at because during the height of busy season, he took a sick day but instead went to watch a Lord of the Rings movie marathon (to be clear, he was a full-time employee not a fellow intern). I did not recommend that he meet my boss.

  128. Gullible Vengeance Umpires*

    I had an intern just…disappear.

    She had a great portfolio and keen interest in the work we were doing. She had worked for me for about 8 weeks and seemed really excited about the summer – we even planned for her and her partner to attend a conference in a little resort town at the end of the summer. One day, the partner calls and says Intern was in the hospital, he wasn’t sure how long she would be there, but he’d call back as soon as he could with an update and I could call him if needed. I waited a week and called him, no answer. I tried both of them a few more times over the next month. I looked them up in the student directory and they were gone. Her social media went silent. I never heard from either of them ever again.

    We still owe her a paycheck for a time card she never turned in (this was before it was electronic). I hope she’s okay.

      1. Gullible Vengeance Umpires*

        Oh yes. I have looked for her several times since. It was 8 years ago.

        I looked back through my emails and see that the partner called me a week after the initial call and said she would call within the week, but she never did.

  129. joopiter*

    A few summers ago, we had an intern thrust upon our department, as she was a high-level executive’s niece. First day of her internship coincided with our annual team meeting, so we asked her to take notes for us. She set herself up at the end of the table, facing the whole team, flipped open her laptop, and we all got to see the array of stickers she had decorated it with. Including the giant one that said TREAT YOUR GIRLFRIEND, except the “TR” was deliberately faded out.

  130. AnotherOne*

    I don’t know if it was weird but situationally odd maybe?

    I was a legal intern after my 1L year at a city agency in NYC working with the office’s disciplinary officer.

    Bribery is a big deal in NYC government. If an employee was really helpful and someone brought in a $100 cake to say thank you, the most that could be done with the cake was put it in the breakroom but things often had to be thrown out because it could potentially, maybe, possible be viewed as taking a bribe by a city employee.

    Aka the “B” word.

    I spent the day out in the field getting to see what the agency employees actually did. The guy who took me out bought me a snack. When I got back to the office, without thinking, I made some joke about the cookie being a bribe.

    OMFG. You’d have thought I just hurt someone’s puppy.

    I guess it taught me the importance of thinking before I spoke so that’s good?

  131. Tarn*

    It’s not as crazy as some of the others, but we had one intern who really struggled with understanding directions, and who wouldn’t ask questions. We’d trained him on basic report-writing, and once he seemed comfortable on the process, set him up with a list of reports to make. His taskboard would show items like “Report 1234 – Llama Hair Types” or “Report 5555 – Scissor Sharpness Over Time”, with details in the body of the task.

    When we first needed him to modify a report, we put an entry on his taskboard “Modify report 1234 – Add the Extra Curly llama hair type”, and assumed it would be self-explanatory.

    When I checked in with him later that day, he showed me the new report he was working on, titled “Modify report 1234 – Add the Extra Curly llama hair type”. He said he was a little surprised that there weren’t details in the body of the task, but that he was figuring it out as he went along.

    He didn’t last very long.

  132. Summer Siesta*

    At the college campus where I work, we hire students over the summer to help with office jobs and campus tours. During my time supervising these students, I’ve encountered two unforgettable nappers.

    The first was a student who developed a habit of sneaking into our office closet to nap. After we discovered him, we reminded him that he was being paid to work, not to sleep. A few days later, our receptionist rushed into my office looking worried, “One of your students is sleeping in the front meeting room.” Our formal parlor space, meant for welcoming guests, had become his chosen napping spot. We decided it was best he didn’t return after that summer.

    The second napper was even more brazen. For several weeks, she would loudly proclaim, “There’s nothing to do! Guess I’ll get some sleep!” after her lunch break before settling onto a small leather couch in the student worker area for her personal siesta. Even after being woken several times to get back on track, and having a talking to about the proper time and place for a nap it didn’t seem to click. Finally, I had enough. After hours, I moved the couch into my office, hoping to make a point. The next day, she walked by my desk saying aloud, “I’m looking forward to an afternoon nap- hey, where’d the couch go!?” For the rest of the day this student pouted, mourning the end of her summer siestas.

  133. Whelmed*

    There was an intern at my company before I worked there still spoken of in legend, who was assigned the task of sorting a group of sheets in Excel and summarizing them. Weeks later she was still working on this, and when someone checked in on her she was manually copying and pasting rows into the correct order one at a time…

    1. alle*

      This reminds me of someone I know who had to transpose data in a hundred or so excel spreadsheets for his master thesis. He accomplished this by printing out all the spreadsheets, then typing the data back into new spreadsheets. Took him months. It never occurred to him that there might be an easier way.

  134. TheErstwhileLibrarian*

    I have two: one from me, and one from a friend.

    Several years ago, I worked in a museum. We had a summer intern who was into historical reenacting and would show up to work dressed in their reenacting gear–and in character. We weren’t exactly a reenacting type of institution, but we were not NOT a reenacting institution, so the prevailing opinion at first was like “yeah, whatever.” Things got weird when we realized the intern never, ever, EVER broke character. Not over their lunchbreak, not while wrapping up after the museum closed, not even (most horrifyingly) in the bathroom. We were all very grateful when the internship period was over.

    In a similar vein, an intern at a friend’s former job decided to emulate the director. It took a few weeks, but gradually people noticed the intern started wearing similar or identical pieces of clothing and adapting the same speech pattern and mannerisms. The intern was shocked when they didn’t get hired for the open executive assistant position.

    1. Goldfeesh*

      So what was so horrifying that was going on in the restroom? Bringing in their own chamberpot or eschewing modern toilet paper for a washrag?

  135. alle*

    Not really that entertaining of a story, but It had a Master thesis intern who just disappeared for several months. He was working remotely and just stopped responding or showing up to meetings. He reappeared two weeks before his thesis was due. He tried to write up the few data he had generated but there was not much to salvage. On the morning of the day he had to submit his thesis at midnight, it was still only half-finished. Somehow he managed to submit something but I never learnt if they let him graduate with that.

  136. Brad*

    One from the other side *as* an intern at a very large energy company in the mid 90s:

    I was introduced to my manager who was a large, sweaty, angry man who informed me (through clenched teeth the entire time) that his wife was having an affair and had given him hepatitis, and that his plan for the next several weeks was to arrange divorcing and suing her, suing her affair partner, and suing the company we were working for (I don’t think the company had anything to do with the affair – he was just furious at them separately). He handed me a single printed 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper and told me to accomplish the project on it, and as long as we never said another word until the last day of my internship he would sign whatever paperwork needed.

    In stunned silence, I went and read the project which was to program an automated security system to monitor whether or not a critical piece of nationwide energy infrastructure was on fire (at the time, the company was paying dozens of people across the country to visually inspect it several times a day to make sure it was not, in fact, on fire).

    The hitch with this assignment is that I was not a computer science major (nor did I have any formal science, programming, or engineering training). I was a high school graduate who was starting a Fine Arts degree the next fall.

    Long story short, I wandered around the dozens of floors of the corporate skyscraper for days (probably looking like a lost toddler) until I found a floor that looked like they might have the foggiest clue how to do what I had been tasked (they had lab coats, and better computers, and science looking equipment) – and managed to get directed to someone who gave me some “how to” software manuals, and technical documents, and would answer questions if I got stuck – and, against all odds, I did in fact come up with a very duct-taped computer program which would use a scratchy old-school modem to dial into various computerized monitoring stations connected to the thing and use some very rudimentary diagnostic information to determine if the thing was (probably) on fire. It made a wonderful screechy alarm noise if it thought the thing was on fire, and otherwise just dutifully wrote a little “probably not on fire” log, that anyone could check from the computer running the checks every couple of minutes.

    There was an end of summer intern project demonstration – and I was incredibly frustrated to learn that there was actually more than *two dozen* interns working at that company that summer (no one told me, and apparently they didn’t know I was there, so I didn’t get invited to orientation, or group events, or check-ins to see how I was doing…). Also all the other interns had group projects like “learn how to use the internet, and come up with 10 ideas how the company could use it”, or “look up info from old printed records and enter them into a spreadsheet.

    Everyone was astounded to see my software demo, and I heard at least one senior executive ask “who approved that as a project, we were told that wasn’t possible?”

    True to his word my “manager” never said one more word to me and spent the entire summer yelling at a series of lawyers on his phone. But did write me a nice signed letter that I’d completed my internship to his satisfaction a couple of hours before he resigned in spectacular fashion yelling profanities at everyone as he stomped off to the elevator and telling them they’d be hearing from his lawyer.

    1. RecoveringSWO*

      Holy smokes! I can imagine the mix of pride and frustration you have some such a summer!

      1. Brad*

        I’m sure it wasn’t a typical experience, but it left me *strongly* wanting to never work for an organization that large ever again. Almost 30 years later, my entire career has been with much smaller companies and startups (who have their own challenges, but ones I feel I’m better suited for!)

  137. RIP Nibbles*

    I have a summer intern who I’ve had trouble scheduling for our first meeting (to give her an assignment). She cancelled the first one due to illness, then had a very limited window of time during which she claimed she could meet. Finally, she cancelled the next one we scheduled because, and I quote, “I have to drive my boyfriend’s cat to be cremated.”

    Should be an interesting summer.

  138. Yes, really*

    Back with Twitter was relatively new, we has an intern was just terrible. He was the very definition of a nepo baby and top of it, just generally rude and unpleasant to be around.

    He decided that posting public rants about the company and his managers (me included) on his account was cool. I helped run our social media department at the time and stumbled upon his tweets.

    I showed them to upper management, who said we couldn’t fire him because of who his family was (ie very important in our city), but that we could educate him on why its a bad idea to write mean things about your bosses and company on Twitter.

    We had a talk with him. He did not improve. He left at the end of his term and we never heard from him again.

    Years later, he reached out to me, asking if I would be a reference for him for a job. I politely declined.

  139. ZinniaOhZinnia*

    I ran education programs at a farm where we regularly relied on education interns to help teach students about food/nutrition/environment, etc.

    One intern decided that he would only teach in a full-body carrot costume. I am not sure why. Nobody asked for Captain Carrot, but we had Captain Carrot the entire summer.

    3. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

      Honestly adorable! I wonder if the full costume helped him overcome a fear of public speaking or social anxiety. Like Superman…mild-mannered, slightly awkward Clark turns into a handsome, confident, super hero!

  140. Sparkly Librarian*

    This gem is from yesterday, with a high school summer intern (not the only issue, or it’d escape notice):

    1) We needed new coloring sheets for the kids’ section. I offered to let her choose from a computer folder of coloring sheet files, and recommended she choose 5 and print 10 copies each. She expressed interest in selecting the images, but then said she didn’t know how to print. Not with an attitude of “…but I’d like to learn, if you can show me the first time,” but more of “*shrug* I don’t do that work.” Considering that, and that I was in a hurry, and that I’m not actually her supervisor, I elected not to teach her HOW to print right then but rather clicked through images while she looked over my shoulder and chose a few. I printed them.

    2) I picked up the stack of prints, fresh off the printer behind us (where she could see and hear them being printed) and asked her to take them to the kids’ area and put them in the basket where coloring sheets go. I handed them to her (one-handed; 50 sheets isn’t a lot) and she YELPED and dropped them on the table because they were “so hot!” Nonplussed, I agreed that they were “hot off the presses”, and as she wrapped her sweater around her hands as oven mitts, she mumbled, “I didn’t know paper could get HOT…”

    I didn’t dare inquire whether she knew about staplers.

  141. RecoveringSWO*

    I was interning at a state govt agency and while my position was paid by a grant, the rest of the interns were unpaid volunteer positions (which is an absolute shame). One volunteer intern showed up for her first day and asked about parking. Apologetically, the boss told her that she could not be reimbursed for parking. As a local, I knew where there was free street parking within walking distance. I printed her out a map and highlighted the streets. She told me that she didn’t know how to parallel park. Which is tested for our driver’s license, but I get it. She didn’t say anything further but never returned from lunch. On one hand, I totally get not wanting to sacrifice for an unpaid internship. But improving at parallel parking did not seem like something that insurmountable and ghosting didn’t help our impression.

  142. JadedAmber*

    My team handles very niche parts of The Job, so interviewing for internships tends to be dicey, and I try to focus on soft skills. One year, however, it became apparent that despite talking in detail during the interview about her organization skills and poise, our intern (Jane) couldn’t keep her assignments straight, would dissolve into a weeping mess during crunch times, and was talking (factual and supportive) feedback more and more personally. It was so bad that I started considering possibly cutting her internship short, as it was becoming more burdensome for the whole team.
    However, one day, I checked in about something I had asked Jane to do, and she said she trashed it because I told her it was canceled. It was, in fact, merely put on hold, and we just got a confirmation that we still needed it, which I let her know. Jane became dramatically overwrought, gathered her stuff, went to HR, and quit amidst shouting about being mistreated. The poor HR person was extremely confused and tried to make sense of the intern’s speech, but later on, when her and I met to discuss what happened, it looked like a hot mess of Jane accusing me of being rude and racist (we’re both white), never giving her instructions (my direction was all documented via team chat), etc etc.
    I was a bit shocked but thought it was over and good riddance.
    But no.
    A couple of days later, a team member approached me to tell me that Jane was blowing up her phone with texts about how she was suing the company and urging my team member to “quit while you can” and how I would rue the day I decided to discriminate against her. By then the discrimination morphed into one for medical reasons (that no one in HR or myself ever heard of).
    Two weeks later, another team member approached me (the first one ended up blocking Jane because she didn’t respect the request to stop pressuring my team member to quit). Now the story was that I was acting inappropriately with another intern in front of witnesses (we still have no idea what that means), that Jane had a lawyer on retention and was mounting her evidence of team chat screenshots. At that point I handed the mess off to HR and I assume things got handled considering no one’s heard anything else since.

  143. My cat is the employee of the month*

    I supervised a summer intern once that kept declining the work I assigned and expressed interest in helping other departments because their work was more interesting than the work I was assigning her. Some of the managers in the more interesting departments let me know that the intern was asking them for work, and I was grateful they let me know that was going on. It was regrettably a time when I was covering several jobs, and I didn’t have enough time to closely supervise her. I had some good conversations about management with these managers, and eventually talked to HR about whether or not I could fire my summer intern. I’d read on AAM about people who could not fire their summer interns, but this wasn’t the case here. I also had some good conversations about management with HR. Anyway, I eventually talked to my intern, and explained that I understood that she didn’t find the work that interesting (me, neither!) but my department was paying her hourly rate, and she needed to do the work required by the department. I discussed the possibility of her shadowing the more interesting departments and that was used as a reward for her doing the work in my boring but necessary department. And I made peace with needing to spend a lot more time supervising my intern. She did a really good job on the project she completed for us, and her overall quality of work was excellent. She enjoyed shadowing the more interesting departments, but learned that their work wasn’t all that more interesting than the work she had been doing. As for me, I learned a lot about how I didn’t really want to be a manager of people, and certainly not at that company.

  144. HildyJohnson*

    I’m the intern. This is back in the 1980s in England. I was 17 and had an internship on the local newspaper. They were very conscientious about genuinely showing interns how a weekly paper worked, so we got to visit other departments such as the print floor and we got to write some low stakes articles mostly based on press releases as well as turning the forms from funeral homes and weddings into copy. (I am still traumatized by trying to describe 100s of wedding dresses in different ways…) We also got to shadow on assignments and they were generous with those opportunities and would usually try to arrange a final one for your last day.

    For my last day, I was assigned to shadow one of the younger male journalists (who was handsome and knew it) on two assignments to cover — both in smaller towns about 50 miles away. I’ve forgotten the first one’s details, but it was in a lovely seaside town and all went well. There was even ice cream!

    We then went inland to a church that had recently been restored and was being rededicated. There was a whole village event about it, and displays of history all around the church, and the kicker was that a minor royal was attending. I think she was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria (there’s nearly 100 of them, so not a big whoop really.)

    All went well. I mumbled like a chump when introduced to her (I am not a monarchist, and am not overly social skilled), but I survived without embarrassing anyone. Then came the awful moment: part of the entourage nodded at the journalist I was shadowing and asked “And are you his Girl Friday?

    I cheerfully and loudly answered “Oh yes, and it’s been a wonderful experience.”

    Death glare from journalist. After event, he locked himself in the car to type up his copy and told me not to come back until it’s time to drive back. I wandered around the village wondering wtf I’d done wrong.

    Drive back was in silence. He delivered me back to the newsroom for my exit interview.

    My internship debrief went well until the editor doing says “um, you did very well, but why did you tell the princess that you were Rupert Psmith’s girl friend?”

    Oh the mortification.

    I had truly heard Girl Friday and was so into my summer role as reporter with my head full of Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant that I had not thought that most people (rural England in the 1980s was not very professional career for girls friendly) seeing a young woman tagging along would think “girl friend” and not “intern.”

      1. Audrey Puffins*

        Exactly; Hildy misheard and thought the princess had said “Girl Friday”, when she had actually said “girlfriend”

  145. AnonFidence*

    Over the years I have probably supervised or worked 30 or 40 interns- even managed to hire a few them as full time employees after they graduated- but the summer I remember most we had three interns: M1 was the nicest guy ever but forgetful as all get out (stayed late one night and locked himself out of the office, routinely lost his wallet, etc..) M2 was out of character for our office; stern and serious and overly buttoned up with aspirations far above our meager station, and F who was a local that took the internship to spend the summer with her parents but was otherwise brighter and more motivated than what we had come to accept. M1 and F end up dating 2 or 3 weeks into the summer and tried incredibly hard to keep anyone from knowing until I finally sat M1 down to say that since we weren’t paying them no one cares and to have fun but keep it professional in the office. About halfway through the summer all three go out to lunch and discovered that M2 thought a five or six cocktail work lunch was acceptible before returning to the office. M2 was told shortly thereafter that his services would not be needed.
    Happy to say M1 and F got married and I think are coming up on their 10 year anniversary. Despite much lobbying from us they did not name their first child after the place where they met.

  146. Sun*

    We have student workers in higher education, rather than “interns,” but it’s basically the same thing. At a previous college, we once had a student worker who was asked to help with processing transcript requests. The transcripts and address labels were printed by me, he just had to put the address stamps onto the envelope, put the transcript in the matching envelope, seal the envelope and put them in the outgoing mail.

    Well, the entire first batch was returned to sender. Why? He put the address label in the top-right corner, where the stamps would normally go. The postage machine of course put the stamp right over the addresses, and the USPS promptly sent them all back to us, like, wtf is this?

    We asked him and he said he’d never seen or sent mail before. This was in 2016.

    1. Wendy Darling*

      I was once in line at the post office to send an international package. A young guy behind me (it was near the university and he looked like a first or second year but who knows?) was clutching an addressed envelope and looking at all the forms, seeming stressed and watching me fill out the very complicated customs form.

      He finally asked me if he needed to fill that out also. I asked what he was sending. He held out his envelope — a perfectly normal, already-addressed domestic letter. I told him he just needed a stamp. He asked where to put the stamp. I pointed. He asked where to get a stamp. I told him the person at the counter would sell him one (or a whole sheet) but he might want to skip the line and buy one from the machine out front.

      He was gone by the time I got through the line so I hope he just bought his stamp from the machine and went on his way, but this was like 2010 and I was pretty boggled that this guy had apparently never seen mail before because I still had to send paper bills for stuff semi-regularly.

      1. Tradd*

        About 2016 a coworker’s son had to send out graduation gift thank you notes, but he had no idea how to address them or where to put the stamp. Coworker had to do one for a sample for him. I was told he still had issues addressing them all.

      2. Jamie Starr*

        The thing that gets me about this is, I sort of understand that with the advent of email, snail mail decreased a lot. But at the same time, the internet and Google exist. Why not Google “how to address a letter?” I bet the USPS website probably has instructions.

        I weep for the future — people today have access to a mind boggling amount of information and yet many lack the common sense to figure out how to use it.

    2. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

      I’m kinda feelin for the guy because I’m at the age where, if I haven’t done something that used to be very common, in a long time, I just sort of malfunction on how to do it. I haven’t had to deposit a check at the bank in an EON, so that last time someone sent me a check, I totally forgot that I’m supposed to endorse the back of it before sticking it in the ATM. Bank mailed it to me to try again.

      I know you indicated this was a while ago, so it probably doesn’t apply, but these days it’s not that uncommon that UPS and USPS work together. UPS Surepost and final mile delivery. I just sent a return package to an online store that has a pre-paid label that I can drop in either UPS or USPS locations and it’ll get to it’s destination just fine.

    3. allathian*

      Yeah, I can buy that if his parents always paid by direct deposit and didn’t require him to write thank you notes, holiday cards, etc.

      But I’m surprised he didn’t ask for instructions with an unfamiliar task and just went ahead and did it wrong.

      I hope your org didn’t penalize people for asking for clarification.

  147. Tess McGill*

    I had an intern who broke his leg halfway through the term (on the weekend! not at work!) so instead of the field work he was hired to do, we kept him on to enter the data of the other interns. I noticed his productivity was dwindling near the end, so I popped by his desk and he was slumped in his chair, eyes barely open, and actually says to me: “UGH! I am SO BORED! Can you just send me home?” I told him I could send him home permanently if he’d like and could end his term with us and then he whined “It’s not like the field staff are doing anything either.” I was like, wow.

  148. Wendy Darling*

    Lucky me, the worst intern story I have was our lovely intern got shiiiiiitfaaaaaaaced at a huge company party where everyone was drinking very heavily. People were stumbling toward home around 3am (…so you can tell what kind of party this was) and this poor kid could barely walk. His manager ended up riding in an uber with him to drop him off at home and make sure he got in the door because we were afraid otherwise he’d end up passed out on his own front walk.

    That said, that was only like one level drunker than everyone else, so there were no repercussions other than people gently ribbing him about whether he was still hung over on Monday… and there was a lot of that going around.

  149. TurtlesAllTheWayDown*

    The director of development at small nonprofit I worked for right out of college had the “brilliant” idea to auction off internships at our big fundraising events. No amount of reasoning could dissuade him, particularly since none of the work of hosting the interns would fall to him. None of the more senior staff were willing to take on these random kids with rich family members buying them summer internships, so it was dumped in my lap, despite the fact that I was maybe 3 years out of college myself.

    You can imagine the quality of intern you end up with when there is no application process or screening for basically anything.

    My favorite was the one whose aunt had won the auction, and he was staying at their fancy NYC apartment while they summered in Europe. He clearly did not want to be there, our organization had nothing to do with his career aspirations (think teapot making when he wanted to be a lawyer), and he was taking classes over the summer to boot. Showed up intermittently, always late, rarely accomplishing anything, but then suddenly not at all. We started to get worried bc there was no one checking on him, he lived on his own, his parents were away too, etc. Kept reaching out every way possible before we finally had to get a hold of his rich aunt just to make sure he wasn’t dead, which ratted him out. Apparently he hadn’t come for a while then was too embarrassed to come back even when we said it was fine so just decided to ignore us and hope the problem went away.

    Another time we got an auction intern, she seemed mildly competent but not overly so, so I put her on a simple data entry project for a long term research project where volunteers were collecting data on paper forms and sending them to us. Seems simple enough, right? Thank goodness I had backups of backups of the database and kept all the paper copies just in case because reader, she BROKE the database and f*&#d up the data entry so badly (after starting out well, which is why she was allowed more independence) that after her time ended, I had to hire a new intern to undo the damage and redo everything from the summer. Sigh.

    In none of these cases could we do or say anything that might make the interns have a negative view of their experience because it might get back to their wealthy family members who might not donate again. Double sigh.

    Shout out to Arianna, the ONE good intern I got out of that whole scheme.

    1. learnedthehardway*

      That is such a gross abuse of privilege – I’m disgusted with that Director of Development.

  150. modern ghost*

    Years ago, my job had an intern who just could not, no matter how many times it was explained to him, understand that UPS and USPS were not the same thing. We were constantly having to resend documents and packages because he would drop something meant for UPS into a random mailbox and it would disappear into the ether.

    This is exactly how he lost a series of Very Expensive baseball tickets that our boss had told him to send to some clients as a gift. My poor coworker had a miserable time trying to get the tickets cancelled and reissued. He was never allowed to touch the mail again but I have no idea why he wasn’t fired.

  151. Miss Direction*

    We had an intern who, during his week with our department:
    – announced on the first day that he would “be the boss of our entire organization in a few years.”
    – put his feet up on the reception desk and ate a bowl of cereal when tasked to cover the phones
    -when tasked to list the items in a box for record keeping, picked his favorite photos out of a number of boxes and lined them up on his desk. When asked to return them to their original locations he had no idea which boxes they came from because “it doesn’t matter where they were.” This was in the records management department.
    – Walked out of a training he had been sent to be because it was “boring ” and returned to the office. (They promptly sent him back with orders to stay. )
    – Interrupted the instructor of the above mentioned training to loudly demand “How long has HE worked here?” when a slide showing one of the C level employees was shown.

    Needless to say we were all very glad when he was sent to a different department.

  152. Christina*

    Honestly, if they’re unpaid interns, I don’t care WHAT they get up to. Sow the seeds of chaos, little exploited worker bee!

    Paid interns are a different matter, of course.

  153. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

    I will treasure the intern Alison mentioned above who wept because she wanted to work on the patio in case something there inspired her.
    Bless her clueless heart.

  154. PrincessClutter*

    I was assigned a summer student one year, as we had some work to catch up on. The students we offered the role too turned it down, as they got longer summer positions. We ended up hiring our bottom choice candidate. The leads in my department were away, so I became his “work mom”. Not my choice of words, but this young man with no experience ended up being my issue for almost all his contract.

    1 – he had no work experience, and required a lot of coaching. I can handle that.
    2 – he forgot his keys almost daily, and needed them for building access and all copying/scanning, so was constantly needing to use mine. I started sending him home to get his keys after the third week of this.
    3- he could work spreadsheets well, and managed to do some needed research and compiling of data. But would “take breaks” and come into my office and go on rants about covid vaccines, or martial arts, or how 20 year men are getting the short end of the stick in life. He was asked repeatedly to leave my office and go back to his own space, as I had work to do.
    4 – he refused to take direction around workplace norms with regards to the microwaves. We had 2 in our building – one in a shared space, one in a colleague’s office. He kept microwaving lunch in the colleague’s office despite being told not to. His main lunch DAILY was FISH.

    I told my managers that I was not paid enough to manage an intern who was our last choice candidate, and that I’d rather do the catch up work myself in the future than go through that again. And the colleague with the microwave backed me up 100%.

  155. Baby67*

    When I worked in social services we had a program set up for mental health and social work summer interns to get some clinical hours at our halfway house. That program died by it’s third summer, thankfully. It was a very rewarding job but not the best place for interns because they were young and not quite at the level of critical thinking we needed from clinical interns.

    The ones that live in my brain rent-free after all this time:

    Intern started dating a client. When it was addressed by HR and their program advisor, they admitted they knew it wasn’t allowed but refused to break it off, resulting in their getting kicked out of their academic program and fired.

    Intern lent their car to a client with no driver’s license.

    Intern “invested” $6k into a client’s “startup” business. The client took off with the money.

    Intern kept taking $500 a week out of the petty cash because they thought that’s how they got paid in an unpaid internship.

    Intern turned off the main switchboard because it wouldn’t stop ringing. This precipitated multiple wellness checks. Not cool.

    Intern was asked to order mandala and scenic coloring books for adults. Intern ordered a case of pornographic coloring books. We couldn’t send them back. This was back when adult coloring books were all the rage, so it’s not like we weren’t clear and didn’t show the intern an example of what we needed.

    Intern gave a client the keys to the golf cart, which they promptly drove into the pond.

    There are so, so many more, those were just the ones I lost the most sleep over (or laughed the hardest about behind closed doors). I was so relieved when they axed that program.

    1. New Jack Karyn*

      Stories like these are why employee handbooks and onboarding programs have details on things that we would all like to think are obvious.

    2. Bruce*

      Well the one who was taking cash was just making a point that internships should be paid! ;-)

  156. Rhetorician*

    I once visited a tech start-up that had their interns live and sleep in wooden boxes.

    I was part of a small group being given a tour by the founder, and he proudly showed off how “scrappy” they were being. In the back of their unfinished, industrial building, they had 3 or 4 boxes they’d build out of plywood. The boxes were long and rectangular: about 4 foot high–not tall enough to stand up in–but long enough to hold a twin mattress and a few belongings.

    One of the interns told me she had been told that the company would provide housing, so she flew across the country and found out that “housing” meant this box. She’d decorated her box with some string lights and had a little hotplate next to her bed where she cooked her meals.

    I was so horrified I couldn’t speak, and I regret to this day that I didn’t report them to some governmental authority. They had to have been breaking all kinds of labor and safety laws.

  157. Pretzel*

    I once supervised an intern who routinely showed up to meetings (all video meetings, we were 100% remote) wearing a hoodie. Not crazy in itself, but he would usually have the hood up and the drawstring pulled tight, so that all you could see was a little circle of his face in the middle. Think Kenny from South Park. Hoodies were definitely not the norm for this workplace—most folks dressed on the casual side of business casual, but still somewhat business-y—we worked with clients.

    I eventually had a talk with him. I expressed that hoodies were a little bit on the casual side, but since he wasn’t directly interfacing with clients, I was fine with him wearing them on video calls (and honestly even ok with him having the hood up), but that it was coming across oddly and making him look disengaged to have the drawstring pulled tight around his face. He sort of shrugged, and he did stop for a couple days, but then went right back to the Kenny look.

    I just let it go. It seems that it wasn’t the hood that was making him come across disengaged, he was just … disengaged.

  158. AnonyNow*

    Legal intern was asked to put the transcripts from a series of hearings in a binder in reverse chronological order (there were hundreds of pages of transcripts).
    When the lawyer received the binder, she could not figure out what he had done, when she opened the first tab, it started with the final page of the transcript from one of the hearings. After some discussion, it turned out he had put the transcripts in the binder in chronological order but with all pages in each transcript arranged carefully from last to first. It must have taken him hours and he adamantly insisted that is what reverse chronological order meant.

  159. Student*

    I was showing my summer intern how to troubleshoot our lab equipment. A particular power supply was having problems, so I went to power it down and pull it out to do further troubleshooting. I was talking the intern through the steps we were taking to fix the equipment problem and showing him how to make fixes.

    The power supply was elevated way off the ground. I had to climb a ladder to extract it from a rack mounted on the ceiling. As soon as I pulled it off its rack, I got some new information on why this power supply was not working as expected, in the form of a surprise kilovolt to the arm.

    I made a startled, unhappy noise, probably close to “blah-ughg!,” and dropped the power supply. Better it than me. (Side note – electric shocks on ladders are VERY dangerous because of the high odds of falling off the ladder).

    My poor intern was watching me pull the power supply out from the ground level. He saw the power supply fall, and he decided to be The Hero. He caught it. And he started screaming.

    I’m still half-stunned, trying to get down the ladder in one piece, and yelling “Drop it!” at him as if he was a dog who’d snapped up a wrapper off the sidewalk. I had to knock the power supply out of his hands.

    We were both fine, just unpleasantly surprised and in some pain.

    We had a long talk after that about lab safety. I think he decided against a career in our field.

    1. Student*

      Side note – the power supply was malfunctioning because a DIFFERENT intern had assembled it. The Other Intern had opted to skip a step at the end where you trim all the electronic leads down after they’ve been soldered, so that they’re flush with the board. meaning there were many long metal wires coming off the circuit board that were not supposed to be there.

      Those extraneous metal wires were causing the power supply to fail. They were dumping all the power out of the power supply, into any conductive material they touched. This had the effect of dumping all the current into the rack, right up until the moment the power supply left the rack – then it dumped all its stored energy into me & my ladder, and then into Would-be Hero Intern.

      We had a couple different safety measures in place to prevent electric shocks exactly like this – but Other Intern’s poor soldering job had rendered all of them ineffective.

      1. Quill*

        …. I’m going to say interns and electricity are a blanket NO for me from now on. Just like interns and saws.

    2. Wendy Darling*

      The best (read: worst) part about electric shocks is how they make your muscles freak out so you cannot drop the thing that is hurting you. D:

  160. Cruise Director*

    I worked in the activities and planning office of a big resort just after college (yes, think cruise director just not on a ship). Most of our interns were great, and many of them were either offered jobs during the school year or after graduation. Except Jeff. Maybe it was Jeff’s childlike quality that made my boss assign him playground duty and supervision but whatever the kids didn’t do, Jeff did. Including getting his head stuck between the railing on top of the slide from the wrong direction, meaning Jeff was standing ON the slide, with his head stuck between the bars from the outside.

    He hadn’t been trying to assist a kid. He had been trying to hit a wasps nest with a stick. He succeeded and then trapped himself as wasp bait and was stung on the face and neck multiple times. He also forgot to tell us and the paramedics he was allergic stinging insects and just stopped breathing. Later in the ambulance he said he didn’t think he was allergic to wasps if they weren’t yellow. That was an interesting day.

  161. Queer Anon*

    From a summer job several years ago: My department’s first day happened to be the day that another department was having a barbecue at lunch, and we were invited as well. I was pleasantly surprised and happy to eat their food instead of the boring lunch I’d packed, but the most clueless of my department’s interns said, ‘well of course they have to feed us lunch, we’re here all day!’ This could perhaps have been attributed to the naiveté of a high schooler who had never worked anywhere before, but he’d been an intern there the prior summer as well.

  162. j*

    At a reception in the US Capitol for a new head of a biomedical research agency. Beautiful, fancy room, everyone who’s anyone in healthcare policy is there. Reception ends and a bunch of people are walking to the exit to leave the building. Intern declares that her feet hurt and proceeds to walk barefoot through the marble halls of the US Capitol. Me: hey, don’t take your shoes off. Her: why not? Me: Really? Her: I’ll just wash my feet when I get home.

    She wasn’t my intern, so at that point, I just gave up.

  163. BrevIT*

    This is gonna be recognizable to some people, but it amuses me too much not to share. We had a high school-age intern for about two weeks – not solely under my management – but I was asked to give him an assignment from our department. We met in person in my office, and after I finished describing the task to him I asked if he had any questions. He promptly pointed at my desk and asked “What’s that?”

    What he was pointing at was a small fidget toy I keep on my desk for long calls, and I said so. Instead of asking any further questions, the intern reached over, picked it up, and started to play with it. He said nothing else. I didn’t know what to say, and we just awkwardly sat in silence for a minute or two while he fiddled with it, completely enraptured, before I gently suggested he could leave my office if he didn’t have any other questions. That seemed to get through to him.

    (My boss was ALSO obsessed with this fidget toy, but that’s another story.)

  164. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

    I once worked with an intern who walked up to me, introduced himself, and said: “I am a BLACK magic warlock! I have amazssssing powersssss! Did you see the moon turn blood red lassst night? that wassss me! I did that! Bewhhhhare my powerssss!” He was very serious about this. I did not see the moon turn blood red the previous night but I thought it best to not mention it. He was my favorite of the interns there were many more delightfully bizarre conversations with him over the semester.

  165. Math minutes*

    I had an intern who stormed out when I asked her to move her car that was parked blocking in other cars. Later that night she sent me an email that said “your former supervisor was right, you’re a psychopath.” My former supervisor *liked* me and to this day is a reference for me, so I highly doubt he called me a psychopath.

  166. Francophile*

    I was the intern manager at a non-profit. One day a few weeks into the summer intern program, the exec assistant came to my office confused about a phone call she had received for the director from an irate parent, who wanted to give the director a piece of her mind about promising an internship and then cancelling it after the intern had moved to our city for the summer. This didn’t ring any bells for me. I found the supposed intern’s name in our list of applicants, and found the email that we had sent her indicating that her application had not been accepted – there was no ambiguity. I emailed the applicant directly and stated the facts that her mother had called the museum demanding answers we could not give. The next day I received a very contrite phone call from the parent, apologizing for making a stink. It seems her daughter lied to her about getting the internship and was living it up in the big city on mom and dad’s dime.

  167. Prudence Snooter*

    Are we allowed to talk about our own intern experiences?

    I had an internship at a CPA firm about 3 hours from where my husband and I were based, so my husband stayed in our apartment and I rented a room near the firm. During my second week there, my young and otherwise healthy cat needed emergency surgery and sadly didn’t survive. This was my first experience with pet loss and let me tell you I was A MESS. When it all went down I needed to rush home in the middle of a work day and not come back for several days, and then I cried in the office several times. Everyone was understanding but I was so worried I was giving them the wrong impression.

    A couple weeks after that, the increasingly bananas behavior of the people I’d been renting a room from came to a head (this is a much longer story) and it became clear that I needed to pack up all my stuff and escape their house at 2:00 AM when I was scheduled to be at my first client’s office at 9:00. I managed to find a hotel that night and make it to the client on time, albeit very tired. I mentioned what happened to my supervisor at lunch that day and she very graciously let me leave work an hour early a couple times that week so I could secure an apartment (luckily my husband didn’t have much going on that week and did all the research for me). It all worked out fine with minimal disruption to my work schedule, but still I was now certain the firm thought I was a magnet for drama.

    The rest of my 5-month-long internship was thankfully much less eventful, until my very last client that is. This client had an office cat who was there to be a mouser. This cat spent every day snuggled up next to my laptop and I loved him. Right before the engagement ended, I got wind that they were about the take the cat back to the shelter because they’d realized he should live in a home but were unable to find one for him. I think you know that I took the cat.

    At the end of my internship they offered me a full-time position. The partner said I’d done a great job and added, “You made the firm look really good by adopting that cat.” Nine years later I’m no longer with that firm but I still have the cat. His name is Siren.

    1. Rainy*

      My gosh, what a rollercoaster that must have been, but a full-time job and a kitty out of the deal sounds like it turned out all right in the end. I’m sorry about your previous cat though–how sad.

    3. rebelwithmouseyhair*

      I’m very happy for Siren.
      Isn’t there a cat tax here? Do you send a photo to Alison?

  168. Babyfaced Crone*

    A dozen years ago (and against my better judgment, but the applicant pool was only three people and one of them dropped out), I hired a rising college junior for a paid summer internship in a NYC cultural institution. He became known for three things:

    1) Coming to me to ask why his first paycheck was so small, and responding to my explanation of payroll taxes/withholdings with, “I guess I thought when you offered me [stated rate] that would be the amount left *after* taxes.”

    2) Approaching other departments throughout the org to ask if they had any work for him (note: I’d given him plenty of work, he just wasn’t interested in doing it).

    3) Offering, at the end of the summer, to provide a reference for me anytime (I was nearly two decades into my career at that point, but for the sake of expediting his departure, simply thanked him and pointedly did not reciprocate as I practically shoved him out the door).

  169. New Jack Karyn*

    Has anyone mentioned the group of interns who petitioned about the dress code?

  170. Francophile*

    I was once was hiring an intern to do photography at public events – like community festivals, kids summer programs, etc. We asked all interviewees to bring some examples of their photography work. One intern brought his portfolio, which was primarily very graphic nude photos of himself. It was so awkward to flip through the pages of this photo album, while he sat across the table from the other interviewer and me. He was not selected for the internship.

  171. Beth**

    My department normally has a few college students as paid interns each summer for 6-8 weeks. Most are unremarkable. Some are great and come back as permanent employees after they graduate.

    Last year’s crop was…interesting. One was great and is coming back later this year permanently. Their colleagues, though…

    One persistently turned up visibly high. Cannabis is not decriminalised here and we require criminal records checks for all staff.

    One failed to take directions. The only interaction I had with him directly was when I had gone out of my way to invite him to a high profile video call of a type he otherwise would not have gotten to experience. The call was on a hot day in a room where the air conditioning was inadequate. He wouldn’t listen to me when I said the windows were locked and we were not allowed to open them. He spent most of the meeting trying to open the windows and paid no attention to the content of the meeting.

    The other two were surprised by our executive director in a compromising position in a meeting room where they obviously thought they wouldn’t be found.

    This year, we only have one intern. I am sorry that they’re losing out a bit on the social experience of having a peer group, but after last year’s experience, I completely understand.

  172. Daisy*

    Every summer we had a group of 10-15 interns at our law firm-these were current law school students. Our office had a parking deck, and the interns were given free parking spaces on the top level of the 8-story deck (for context, I was paying nearly $200 a month for a spot on the level with the building entrance). One woman complained repeatedly about having to drive up to level 8 to park because it “made her dizzy.” They actually found her a spot on a lower level, which I thought was really unfair to the other interns, but she was a class-A whiner and I think HR just got tired of it.

    1. Daisy*

      Oh, I forgot about the guy another year who got an advance on his paycheck and took time off “to go to his grandmother’s funeral” but really took his girlfriend to Paris and admitted it when caught. He did not get hired.

  173. Nopity Nope*

    My favorite intern story isn’t about an individual, but about a cohort of interns. About 10-15 years ago I was in charge of my department’s internship program for several years. I wasn’t the interns’ direct manager; rather I was responsible for identifying managers to participate, managing the interview and selection process, running group events, and just overall making sure we had a great program that benefited both the interns and the company.

    This was the IT department, and traditionally the 18-25 person cohort makeup was around 3/4 men and 1/4 women. One year, I finally convinced the powers that be to let me focus on attracting more women to the program. I recruited more female managers to host an intern on their team, had a group of female employees at all levels attend the Grace Hopper conference for women in STEM to network and conduct interviews, connected with target student organizations, etc. That year the tables were turned, and the cohort ended up being 3/4 women. (Before anyone gets excited about reverse discrimination or anything, let me say that the percentages worked out as in prior years. In other words, we had approximately the same ratio of male finalists to applicants as in prior years, ditto for women. We did not limit or even decrease the number of male applicants. We simply increased the pool of female candidates, which increased the number of female finalists.)

    Y’all, the dynamic that year could not have been more different than previous years. I had always been disappointed to observe that almost 20 years after my own college/intern experiences, women were STILL being socialized to let men take the lead. These smart, competent women were hesitating to raise their hands to answer questions, holding back on participating, leading, and presenting—even pausing to let their male colleagues speak first. (Obviously not everyone, but it was a noticeable trend.)

    That year, though, the women shone. They dove head-first into discussions, they effortlessly took on leadership roles, they had great group projects where they all presented with confidence, and they were AWESOME. The program got rave reviews from all of the women.

    From the men? Well, one guy was disgruntled that there were events focused on women—in ADDITION to the regular events, such as a standard panel of leaders, but also a separate panel of women in leadership positions talking about their experiences as women in IT. All events were open to all interns, but this guy was pretty obviously miffed that he was forced into a listening role at those events. (Sadly, I doubt he actually heard what was being said.) On the other hand a couple of the men actually told me what an eye-opening experience it was to be in the minority group for what was probably the first time, so they definitely noticed. I can only hope they internalized the experience. But I take that as a win.

    1. Rincewind*

      I attended a women’s college and it was amazing to watch women step up and take charge. There were usually a few men in the classes, and many of the professors were men, but it was definitely a female-led space. I’d say more men should spend time in women’s spaces, but that might subtract from the value of women’s spaces because then they will have more men in them.

      1. Beth*

        When men enter women’s spaces, the space usually ceases to be a women’s space.

        Too often, the men assume that they’re still the centre of attention, just with more women in the audience. And too many of the women don’t (or can’t) push back against the force of socialization and expectation. At least that’s what I’ve seen, over and over.

        1. linger*

          And the research bears this out: on average, conversations in mixed-gender groups follow the norms of male-only conversations (e.g. for turn-taking, and for overall formality level) much more closely than those of female-only conversations.

  174. Daphne Moon*

    I’ve been pretty lucky with interns. Let’s be real: you will always get one who wears a crop top one time, breaks the copier, etc.
    There was one day-a pretty toasty DC day-where they were all sent out in various errands. Nothing too crazy, just a few blocks here and then to other office locations. They did everything perfectly. The only issue is that their walking outside in the DC summer resulted in a bit of a BO scent across the office.
    We let them go home nearly that day.

  175. TerminallyWeird*

    I worked for a shady political nonprofit that was headquartered in the Montana wilderness because our boss wanted to use the location as his summer home. We had 20ish college interns who all lived in cabins on-site (imagine a dorky summer camp for politics nerds), while the staff lived in town ~30 minutes away. One day, a forest fire broke out between town and the office/cabins complex. Staff could not go to work because the one road in and out was closed by the fire department. Big Boss refused to help interns evacuate, despite a mandatory evacuation order, and denied staff permission to work from home. All staff banded together and refused to go in.

    Once the fire cleared, Big Boss had a party to celebrate all the “loyal” staff (the trapped interns) at his lake house. He provided alcohol to underaged interns. The next morning, one of my reports was a no-show. When I went to her cabin, I found her unresponsive and rushed her to the nearest emergency room. On my way out, the GM handed me her emergency contact form so I could update her parents.

    Big Boss showed up at the emergency room. He wanted to “get everyone’s story straight” before I called her parents. He demanded to see the intern and to have the contact form, which I declined. He tried to physically push past me until the doctors intervened. Her alcohol poisoning was so severe that we had to travel by ambulance to a larger hospital. All the drive over, Big Boss was calling and threatening me with arrest for “theft of intellectual property”. Turns out, nobody had digitized the emergency contact information and I had the only copy. After I stopped answering his calls, he fired me via voicemail.

    My intern was eventually discharged, but the staff member sent to pick us up was told that if she drove me home, she would also be fired. She would only agree to let me in the car if I agreed to hide in the trunk for the 2 hour drive (just in case he had cameras in the company van??). The drive sucked, but I’ve never been prouder to be fired.

    1. alle*

      That’s wild. What was he planning to do with the contact form, call her parents and lie about what happened?

    2. Two-Faced Big-Haired Food Critic*

      “Get everyone’s story straight” = make up a lie. I mean you know that, but good grief.

  176. Office Chinchilla*

    There’s a special place in my heart for the intern who asked me earnestly one day when *our* spring break was.

    Different job, different intern: I walked into the office one day to find my two co-workers staring, shocked, at our intern.
    Me: “What’s going on?”
    Intern: “They’re accusing me of being racist but I’m not being racist, I swear!”
    (At this point I should note that my co-workers are black men and the intern and I are both white women.)
    Me: “What did you say?”
    Intern: “I asked (co-worker 1) if his family gets together and eats fried chicken every Sunday!”
    Me: “What was the context?”
    Co-worker 2: “There wasn’t one. No one was speaking, and then she looked up and asked that. And then you walked in.”
    Me: “Sounds pretty racist, Intern.”
    She didn’t want to admit it, but also the part where she was the first one to use the word “racist” meant she knew…

    1. not my usual self*

      Wow… this wasn’t me, but, I’m white, and, you know what my family did every Sunday when I was growing up? We went to my grandma’s house and she made us the best fried chicken ever. So this very well could have been me if my socially awkward self was trying to come up with some small talk to try with co-workers. It wouldn’t have made it any better and I understand why it was wrong in this intern’s case and would have been wrong in my case, but I probably wouldn’t have thought at the time that my good memories of Sunday dinners at my grandma’s would have been seen that way by a co-worker! It would have been a good lesson for me just like it was for this intern if it did happen.

  177. Rincewind*

    Can I share my own story? It wasn’t memorable to my boss thankfully.
    I had volunteered to timekeep for our business’s “innovation summit” which was a lot of interns presenting their ideas to a panel of big bosses.
    I woke up the morning of the summit and I was SO SICK. Like literally puking my guts up sick. But I work from home and my usual wake time is 30 minutes prior to the start of my workday. By the time I determined that this was going to be a problem and needed to back out, the summit was starting.
    I did the whole timekeeping bit from my bathroom. Like I had timers running, vomiting into the toilet, and a timer would go off so I would unmute and croak out “1 minute warning!”, mute, and vomit again.

    I really should’ve backed out but I didn’t know how to do it gracefully so late in the game.

  178. WhyAreThereSoManyBadManagers*

    An intern candidate showed up for her (professional workplace) interview 45 min late, wearing short shorts that showed off more hooha than anyone wanted to see, and with HER MOM who, when I called the candidate back to follow me to the interview room, started to follow us. I stopped her and said oh that’s ok you can wait in the lobby and she shot daggers out of eyes at me (but did huff stomp back out). No her daughter didn’t get the internship.

  179. Frogs*

    My former company took on interns from a skilled migrant program that placed recently-graduated international Masters-level students in biotech companies. These people were generally adults in their 30s and you’d think they’d be pretty cluey. Some of them were great, but… The most memorable was a man in his 40s who was convinced he was just one brilliant idea away from unimaginable wealth. And ideas – he was FULL of them, and liked to explain his get-rick-quick schemes to us in great detail. One day he came into work almost bursting with excitement because he’d come up with his best one yet. He explained that his block of flats had a small fish pond in the front courtyard “that no-one was even using!” – he was astounded that such a valuable commodity was sitting, untapped, mere metres from his dwelling! The big plan? He was going to breed, and sell frogs. When asked who would buy the frogs he looked at us incredulously “Everyone! Laboratories, school laboratories, zoos, the French…” and how was he going to distribute the frogs? In tubular poster mailers, via the Australian postal service, of course! We had a coworker who put on a sweet, demure lady act, but who could be a real piece of work when things didn’t go her way, and this was often. And she took everything VERRRRRY seriously. I could see her practically vibrating while the intern gushed stupidly about frogs, until she exploded into a litany of fiery criticism “This is the worst idea I have ever heard in my life and I am 46 years old! Do you know frogs are living creatures? Parcel delivery takes 3 to 5 days! These frogs will die! Your customers will receive stinking, dead frogs! Have you brought this up with your body corporate? Do you think your neighbours want to hear ‘ribbit ribbit’ all night so you can pursue your moronic frog scheme on communal property? I bet you haven’t even researched the type of license you would need! This is all very poorly thought out!” It went on for what seemed like hours. At the end of her tirade, the intern just turned and walked away.

    The intern was fired about 2 weeks later for downloading some enormous game from Piratebay and knocking out the entire company’s (c. 2008-ish) limited internet allocation for the month (which he strenuously denied, until IT somehow proved the machine was accessed using his password, at which point he simply said “I will leave honourably” and walked out of our lives, leaving them a lot less colourful).

  180. Wolf*

    My old employer would offer a forklift certification to interns. One of our interns was a petite woman. The forklift has a “child proof” function that blocks the machine when less than 50kg are detected on the seat. Poor intern, who was definitely a legal adult – just a smaller one, used a 5kg bag of bird sand as a pillow to sit on.

    1. linger*

      Wondering now if newly-certified Forklift Driver Klaus was an intern.
      [Content warning: Starts as cheesy safety video, but escalates rapidly into Bad Taste levels of comedic gore. German with English subtitles. On YouTube, /watch?v=psAWGv5O7Zs]

  181. Roscoe da Cat*

    Famous comment by an intern at my scientific workplace (it was actually memorialized on the door of the supervisor)
    “This internship was very disappointing. I thought we were going to do science and all we did was analyze data.”

    Total misunderstanding of science…

  182. Honor Harrington*

    I worked in a complicated industry for a very large, very well-known firm, Company A. Summer Intern was very excited to intern with us. In order to understand the customer experience, we asked her to make an appointment with a customer service rep – see what questions they asked, what information they needed, what information they provided the customer, etc. She was interning from home, so we asked her to make the appointment at the local office.

    Intern loved this idea and was very excited.

    A week later, she very sheepishly came to me and said she had a “funny story” to tell me. She had made an appointment with a customer service rep and went to the meeting – and at the end, they pointed out that she was at an appointment with our direct competitor. Intern did not understand that Company A and Direct Competitor B were different companies.

    Intern did not get a job offer or a follow up internship.

  183. Zebras*

    I work in the UK, and my company will occasionally host work experience students, which is basically when a high school student comes to shadow and do some entry-level admin work for 1-2 weeks to get exposure to an office environment. The positions are unpaid and meant to be purely for the benefit of the student.

    We had a very sweet 15 year old with us for a week a couple of years ago. After spending about 30 minutes on the task he’d been assigned, he announced that he was going to take a break, then proceeded to pull up Netflix on his work computer and watch a show without headphones, at full volume in our very full open plan office. His supervisor was in a meeting, so this continued for about 20 minutes until our head of legal went and asked him to use headphones so she could conduct a meeting with our lawyers without the sound of anime blaring in the background.

    1. Anon Intern Nonsense*

      I’m not in the UK but when I hear the phrase “work experience” it makes me think of the Toast of London character Clem Fandango (who was on work experience at a recording studio) and it makes me giggle.

  184. Legally Brunette*

    Back when I worked in a local prosecutor’s office, one summer intern became the butt of jokes for months for a number of incredible courtroom escapades in the span of 5 days. As a recent college grad, the intern was tapped to provide a non-legal assessment of the prosecution’s case and how the jury received it. Easy job, right? Yes, except for how one juror decided this young woman was giving her “intimidating glances,” which were reported to the court. So on the third day of a murder trial, the intern ends up being addressed on the court record by a notoriously apoplectic judge who had already threatened to throw people out of the proceeding. While the judge determined nothing untoward happened with the intern, she was promptly banished from the proceeding, with little else to occupy her, since everyone in the office was watching the big murder trial.

    Everyone, that is, except one state Assistant Attorney General who was presenting a RICO case in the next courtroom over. The judge in that case was a woman who had been jumped on the bench by a defendant and assaulted in the recent past, and who was, understandably, wary of unexpected observers in her courtroom. Despite the intern going through security outside the courtroom and wearing a prominently-displayed, court-issued ID, the judge ordered the intern be escorted out of the courtroom and frisked in the hallway by the biggest, meanest-looking female sheriff. This story reached the office before the intern even got back from that day’s escapades.

    By the end of the week, the entire office, and most of the other courthouse offices, had heard of the hapless intern’s saga. No one let her forget it, even when she was hired full-time as an assistant, and the intern was convinced she would never work as an attorney. The intern persisted, however, and ultimately went on to have a successful and uneventful litigation career, albeit not in criminal law.

    Dear reader, I was that intern ;)

      1. Legally Brunette*

        That glance has served me well :) I ended up revisiting whole experience a year later at law school, when I randomly ran into the Public Defender who got the murder case on appeal. She was like, “Oh my God, that was YOU in the transcript!” She definitely got the glance from me for that.

  185. Drama Llama's Mama*

    I was the intern. In grad school, part of my program was a mini-internship with an arts organization for 6-12 hours per week each semester. In my first semester, I was assigned to the development director at a performing arts org and we agreed I’d come in 2 days a week for 4 hours. For the first day of each week, I worked on a database of potential foundation funding sources (this was the early 2000s, so basically reading a paper book, judging if a foundation might be a good match for a grant, and if so, putting the book information into a Lotus Notes spreadsheet). The second day, I was assigned to the phone bank. I am THE WORST cold caller ever, I hate it so much. I probably made 6 real calls in my four hours each day from the list and the rest of the time, I would call my cell phone (in my bag with the ringer turned off), hang up, and record that whatever number was on my list had not answered.

    I did much better the next semester when my project at a different organization involved historical research on their venue, designed by a famous architect, and working on a proposal for funding for a restoration project.

  186. IdrinkTea*

    So I have worked in law firms for most of my career. And every summer, we get a new crop of summer associates, who are essentially interns. Although they get paid a ton and get amazing perks – loads of fun events (ball games, shore excursions, parties on boats, etc.) – and they get a chance to see what working in a firm is really like. Because yes, they ARE expected to actually work. The key here is that if they do well in the program, they will be in line to get a job offer once they finish law school. So there is a lot at stake here.

    One memorable summer, we had a summer associate who did not seem to have gotten the memo about actual work needing to be accomplished. He thoroughly enjoyed all of the perks and benefits of the gig – he was present for every outing, every party, every lunch. But the senior associates who were supervising him – I’ll call him Stan – could not get much work out of him. Stan always had an excuse about why he hadn’t completed an assignment. Big surprise – it was always someone else’s fault.

    This particular firm had a regular Friday afternoon drinks cart (London based firm) and it was for everyone – attorneys and staff. It was a lovely tradition. Some beer and wine and delicious nibbles from the firm’s onsite chef. One Friday afternoon in early July Stan came to the drinks cart. And proceeded to drink. And drink. A lot. Wine and beer. No food. You can see where this is going. He ended up getting into a near fist fight with one of the supervising senior associates and had to be escorted out of the office and into a cab.

    We never saw Stan again.

  187. Former theater administrator*

    Less weird and more “oh bless their little intern heart.” I used to work for a small theater company and we had a couple interns each summer. One year our production intern was this very sweet young high schooler who had never had chores growing up or any kind of job before. One thing to know about theater production: it can include a lot of scut work because you do things like build sets, take care of props and anything that needs to be done. I’ve done all of the below tasks even not as an intern.

    Things he did not know how to do that we had to teach him:
    — Wash dishes (have to wash dishes that are props in the play)
    — Stuff envelopes
    — Wrap a vacuum cord around the vacuum. When he finished vacuuming the lobby one day, he wrapped the cord around the vacuum cleaner in such a tangle that myself and the box office manager burst out laughing. I called him back into the office and taught him how to do it properly “so that your roommates in college don’t make fun of you later.”

    He was a really hard working kid and willing to do anything, it just really showed that his parents had skipped teaching him a lot of things.

  188. Brett*

    20 years ago when I was an intern, someone sent an email to the entire company without using BCC (a few thousand people) and the interns went crazy with reply-alls, including crass jokes and so on. There were at least 500 reply-all messages that day and there was no way to stop it in the mail server back then. Regular employees were also doing the reply all ‘take me off your list’ type replies, but finally management had communicated to everyone to cut it out. After the first day the chain had begun to die out. But a few dedicated interns were having too much fun and kept at it for a couple more days, ignoring warnings that their conduct was not ok. Finally a few of them were fired over this ridiculously trivial email.

  189. flamingoAudacity*

    current intern at my office – doesn’t know how to use a USB, asked for a mac instead of a PC the first day, didn’t know the stock market was closed on weekends/holidays. Thought we were a major player in our industry instead of a service company. Intern was a nepo hire when they turned down a rather good internship in favor of waiting to hear from a ‘better’ company – an offer never came.
    The big one was when they loudly announced that they didn’t want to work in our particular industry, not because of any moral objection, but because they didn’t think the industry would last another 5 years.

  190. Congressional Mess*

    I interned back in summer 2008 for a US Senator. Towards the end of the hot DC summer, there was (maybe still!) Ice Cream Day. It was a glorious afternoon where some dairy lobby brought in truckloads of ice cream for congressional staff. The interns got to leave the office and bring it back for ourselves and the full-time staffers. Towards the end of the day, the legislative assistant I reported to ran over to the interns and yelled, “YELL needs her ice cream, someone needs to get it! She’s ending her meeting in about 20 minutes!” Our particular Senator was called around the office by her initials. It was not actually YELL but… a different similar meaning word. I was the only intern without doing anything at the moment so it was up to me to run across the office building and another block to get the last dregs of the ice cream. By the time I returned from sprinting in 90 degree weather in a full suit skirt and heels, I managed to walk in just as YELL exited her office. I did my best not to audibly wheeze and went to hand her the somewhat melted chocolate ice cream and spoon. She proceeded to only grab the spoon and eat the entire cup of ice cream out of my hand. I stood there silently.

  191. Ainsley*

    The bad intern in this case was me – I was student teaching and didn’t realize basic job norms. I left when the bell rang/students were dismissed because nobody had told me you shouldn’t. I had never had a real job before. I also was so stressed out from student teaching/hated my life that on a day when we had an assembly, I asked to go home sick instead of sitting through an assembly. Then the next time we had a half day for professional development, I put my stuff in the room we were meeting in and went to buy pizza from the cooking class that was selling it after school. I came back into the room to one of the other English teachers loudly telling my cooperating teacher that “Ainsley skipped out again, I saw her walking down the hallway” and loudly mocking me and my cooperating frantically trying to shush him. I admittedly was not the best student teacher, but I was 22 and really depressed and struggling and no one noticed that. I still am mad at the teacher who thought I was lazy and skipping out when I just went to buy some pizza. Needless to say, I no longer teach!

  192. Flawless Victory*

    ::cracks knuckles::

    In the last days of the Great Recession, our Division President required my department director to hire his daughter as a summer intern. We didn’t actually have an internship program, so we had to scramble to find things for her to do.

    Our department was based out of corporate HQ in Big East Coast City. Division President and daughter lived in Big West Coast City, near one of our satellite offices. The plan was that she would spend a week training with us and then go home and work out of the office there. No one else from our department worked there. We had to pay, out of our department budget, for our new intern to fly to our city and spend a week at the four-star hotel across the street from our HQ in order to train. Because of the impact to our budget we had to cancel a few department events.

    Intern came for her week of training, flew back to Big West Coast City, and didn’t show up to work her first day back. We never heard from her again.

    Division President promoted his wife to be our Senior VP a few months later. Last time I checked they were both still there.

  193. TheNatFantastic*

    We had an intern who was essentially a golden retriever in an (alarmingly tall) Gen-Z body. He was always eager, enthusiastic, hardworking and… just *so* incredibly naive and forgetful.

    One time I caught him looking sadly out of our office windows at the rain. I asked him what was wrong. He was sad that he had forgotten his lunch and would have to get wet going out to get some. He had toyed with the idea of getting food delivered but decided it was too expensive. I reminded him he had driven to work (he drove every day). He responded with “OH YEAH! I FORGOT I COULD DRIVE!!!”

    He once found a word he didn’t understand so came to ask me what it meant. The word was ‘vulva’. He 100% did not do this with any ill-intent. He genuinely did not know. It is important to note that we do not work in any way related to the medical industry. I didn’t ask where he saw it.

    I once accidentally radicalised him. I was reading the news at my desk and mumbling to myself about a mini-budget that had come out that day. Once I had explained the concepts of 1) a mini-budget, 2) the Chancellor of the Exchequer, 3) tax to him, he was absolutely INCENSED. He spent the rest of the afternoon on Google looking up politicians and saying ‘have you seen what he earns? I BET HE’S GOT A LOAD OF RICH MATES TOO!’

    He thought the kitchen was haunted. Not because anything had happened in there. Just ‘vibes’.

    Then there was the time I accidentally convinced him that people eat mice in France (it’s probably important to note we live approximately 30 miles from France). Basically he didn’t understand something, I made a joke, he took me extremely seriously. I will never forget the absolute indignation on this sweet giant boy’s face when he looked at me and said “I THOUGHT THEY WOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER AFTER RATATOUILLE”.

  194. Zorp*

    Our director hired his “friend from baseketball” as an intern. He “happened” to be the son of a VP of his former company. From day one, we could see he was a problem. The kid started off by ranting about his old job and how he quit because it was so awful. Someone who worked at this kid’s last job let us know that he was actually fired from that job. When confronted, he cried.

    One day, he was working on homework at work (he was taking three classes and working full time – we NEVER would have allowed that for anyone else). One of his two bosses asked for him to save it for his lunch. Then, ten minutes later, she walked by a breakout room and saw him in there, working on his homework. He begged for her not to tell our director. We did, of course.

    Many other things transpired, but the day before he was let go, we had a heart to heart. I told him that it was unlikely he could turn things around.

    He told me he regretted how he acted with the whole “homework thing”. He said if he could do it all over again……… he would have gone to his truck to do the homework.

    He clearly had no concept of what he had done wrong.

  195. History Nerd*

    My intern story is more frustrating than anything.

    It was my first time ever having an intern or supervising anyone. My boss told me that I would have an intern the week before he showed up and I had no idea what to do with the poor kid. But he was one of the faculty’s kids, so of course I made the best of it. His office was just down the hall.

    I decided to give him an informed consent form – the form a person reads and signs to be in a research study – to edit. I’d already filled in the relevant information but needed to dramatically simplify the wording so that it was understandable for someone with an average reading level. I explained how to do that and how to check the reading level in Word, then set him to work. He edited it and sent it back. It still wasn’t what it needed to be so I added some comments and some changes with Track Changes and sent it back. When he sent it to me again, he’d made about a third of the changes I’d suggest and ignored many of my comments. I made more and sent it back to him. This happened 2 or 3 more times over the course of a few weeks, in which I gave him some other tasks to do and had conversations with him face-to-face multiple times.

    Finally, frustrated with his poor progress on this form, I walked down to his office to talk to him about it. I explained that my comments were not suggestions and not including them would probably mean not being able to start the study when we had planned to. He seemed to understand. I returned to my office and a little bit later, he sent me the document again – still without all of the edits I needed. His attitude throughout was annoyance at me, like this work was beneath him. He planned to be a doctor, you see, so he didn’t need to be able to explain a research study to patients – even though truly good doctors will make the effort to explain things to their patients in a way the patient understands and that’s an important component in the process of getting informed consent.

    By this time I was so frustrated and found his “help” to be so much extra work, I just did it myself. When I went to tell him that I had completed it and he didn’t need to, he got frustrated with me and insisted that he hadn’t seen any additional edits. Puzzled, I asked how that would be possible and he insisted that it was because he was working on a Mac rather than a PC, requiring the document to be converted and supposedly losing parts of it in the process. He had been given a PC laptop to use but had refused.

    1. CubeFarmer*

      We went through a spate of interns who used their Macs instead of the PCs at their workstations. The conversion process became cumbersome. We quickly realized that “Competency with a PC platform, and MS Office” was a must in our job descriptions. We had assumed that everyone had some degree of competence with a PC because…life? Apparently, not.

  196. CJ Cregg*

    This isn’t a horror story so much as a little odd. I had an internship in college that was adjacent to my major (interning for the technical magazine of a standards company as a journalism major). My first week there, the office was celebrating someone’s birthday or retirement. Our department was on its own floor, and I was the only intern. Just before lunch my boss very nonchalantly tells me the whole office is going out and they’ll all be back in a couple of hours and they’ll see me later. As it was my first week, I didn’t have any projects yet, so the whole floor went out to lunch and I sat at my desk trying to find things to do to be productive. I wasn’t offended that I wasn’t invited, but now as an adult, I just find it very strange because every professional job I’ve had always includes the interns in things like this.

    2. linger*

      Leaving you behind might have made sense if this group partied hard and they knew you’d have been isolated (and possibly underage?) at a well-marinaded event with raucous in-jokes. Or possibly if it was something that had already been budgeted and catered before you were known to be joining. But otherwise, yeah, odd.

  197. intern misnomer*

    We had a fantastic intern named “Sarah,” who was introduced with much fanfare by our team lead as “Betsy” at our monthly all-staff meeting. Her name was decidedly NOT Betsy, but Sarah gamely smiled and waved hello to the room.

    Our lead was mortified when she realized the mistake but Sarah was such a good sport that she outright embraced the mix-up. All summer long, “Betsy” became the perfect foil – someone filed some paperwork incorrectly? Must be that rascal, Betsy. Budgeting confusion? Blame Betsy.

    We all miss Betsy. Er… Sarah.

  198. Technically a Former Director*

    Oh, no, am I too late for this topic? That would be a shame because I have a few:

    1) The intern who would print out a couple dozen pages of programming code, then spend all afternoon “reading” it while chain smoking on a bench outside the office.

    2) The interns who, as a going away prank, replaced someone’s entire workstation with handmade cardboard replicas, including computer & monitor, iPad, charger cable, headset, pencil mug, desk chair, etc. (Naturally, the replacement screen had them scrolling facebook at work.)

    3) The intern who missed work over spending a night in prison after a drunken bar fight with some of the other interns.

    4) The intern who made an oops while running a DELETE statement against accounting data. They were accidentally connected to the production server. And accidentally executed without a WHERE statement, which meant they deleted ALL the data. (Fortunately, backups were available, minimal work was lost, and they learned how serious the advice about never writing queries in a random window are, without job loss or even much worse than a scolding.)

    5) The intern who was attending a tense meeting with a client where we were getting scolded for being behind on a project. A friend was chatting with him on messenger, and he pasted his reply, which was a link to a clip from Bruce Almighty, into the wrong messenger window. “Do you like jazz?” became a cautionary tale for years of interns to come. (No jobs were lost.)

    6) The hero intern who came to realize that their non-intern supervisor had been faking the output of the complex business data analysis they had been working together on for ~6 months. The deception was sufficiently clever that only the intern figured it out, and then was put in the awkward position of figuring out how to tell someone from our upper management. In the end, the senior programmer was literally generating random numbers to show in the demos, rather than pulling from data sources… and had been for months.

  199. judyjudyjudy*

    One summer was the Summer of Interns, because we got three interns for our eight-person group instead of the usual one (and some summers we got none). We were “voluntold” to take two of the three, because they had connections with the CEO and the division VP. Other than the nepotism, they were pretty good interns!

    The third intern, “Brunhilde”, was selected from a small pool of candidates we interviewed; she seemed to come with very specific experience that perfectly dovetailed with our work, and we were glad to have someone who seemed like they would need less coaching. Unfortunately, Brunhilde was a total disaster! She needed near constant supervision because of her frequent mistakes, even for simple errors she made previously. She fell asleep at her desk, she often ducked out early, left shared equipment a mess. left biohazard spills on the lab floor…but the worst part was she never took responsibility for anything that went wrong, so it was difficult to coach her.

    During that same summer, a permanent employee left his position with us to follow his husband to an exciting new job. We advertised for an entry level position. Brunhilde was supposed to go to graduate school in the fall, but that fell apart because the only person she wanted to work under suddenly claimed she didn’t have the grant money to support another student. At that point, Brunhilde tried to angle for that open position, but her performance was so poor that there was no way we would consider it. To her credit, Brunhilde took her rejection on the chin but continued to produce subpar work for the rest of the internship. It was clear to me that Brunhilde was really, earnestly trying, but didn’t have the lab hands and would not admit that she made mistakes — nightmare to manage!

    Brunhilde asked if she could leave her internship two weeks early, to go on a planned vacation to Chile; we were happy to see her go. I genuinely wish her the best, but hope to never work with her again.

  200. Annabel*

    My supervisor handed one of our interns a ring of keys and asked him to get a copy made. Without any hesitation at all, he walked to the photocopier, placed the keys onto the glass and made a copy. He proudly handed the paper to my supervisor. When my supervisor realized it was not a silly joke, I got the honor of taking the intern to the nearest hardware store and showing him how keys were made. He was completely in awe. My supervisor hung the photocopy of the keys prominently on his wall and kept it there for the rest of his time with the company.

  201. rebelwithmouseyhair*

    I gave my intern a translation to do and she managed to produce a sentence about a “place where Marie-Antoinette and Hamlet fell in love”. I have a rule about never making fun of anyone’s ignorance, because we all have to learn, but I couldn’t help laughing out loud. And I couldn’t begin to think where to even start…
    I eventually managed to ask her who the two people were

    (This was an English girl studying French at master level so she should have been well aware of both)

  202. rebelwithmouseyhair*

    My happy intern story, with whom I learned a lot about hiring:

    The boss gave me a wad of CVs, after my first glance at each I had only put one aside as being worthy of interviewing. I saw he was from Texas. This was when Bush was president and my first thought was “I don’t want a Texan redneck”. Then, after another look at the other CVs which were all pretty dismal, I reasoned with myself that I was being racist. So I brought him in for an interview. Just looking at him as he came out of the lift, I thought “this is a great guy, I’m hiring him”. Turns out he was a gay vegan from Austin (which I’d never heard of but learned a lot about), so we had a good laugh about my previous prejudice.

    Before you crucify me, this was definitely a learning curve story, and while I did get on with him all the better for him being a gay vegan from Austin, the reason why he was one of the best interns ever was because he listened and learned very quickly, because he had a hugely varied professional experience, having worked in pharmaceuticals, and finance and having spent so much time under cars repairing them with his dad. I was able to offload all the translations in those industries to him, leaving me to do the kind of translation I enjoyed much more.

    He was always game to take tough technical stuff on, and would do so saying “well it’s not rocket science”. At one point we got a text about NASA and I looked at him and said, “Right James, now this actually IS rocket science. But you grew up around Houston, you have this stuff in your genes.” He did a great job.

    We’re still friends to this day.

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