Thursday, January 20, 2011

All the Things I Learned at My First Internship


I am what I like to call a professional intern. I'm not doing an internship that was through a school. I'm not interning for a six month period to put on my resume. I'm working open-ended for an undetermined amount of time for free. Yes. I am aware of how completely stupid this sounds and normally I would make fun of someone who is quite obviously a sucker who will be working without pay for the rest of their life. Rest assured, I won't be living out of a cardboard box any time soon...

I'm working at DeFranco Inc. This is the company of the very popular YouTuber Philip DeFranco. Every week I get to work behind the scenes of the many popular online shows they've created: the Philip DeFranco Show, Black Box TV, Like Totally Awesome (LTA), The Vloggity and Cute Win Fail (CWF). I'm learning a lot and seeing how they're building the brand and expanding the company. I'm on the ground floor of something really awesome and I'm so lucky to be a part of it. It really is the highlight of my week.

My internship is so awesome... and I almost didn't take it. Not just because I thought it might have been a prank, seeing as I found out about it from Twitter (yes, I'm finally getting the whole Twitter thing). I had a terrible experience about two months before I accepted my position at DeFranco Inc...

...at my first internship.... BUM BUM BUUUMMM!!!!

*Cue Lightning Flashes, wolf howl and crying children*

My first internship was back in Florida, about a month before I was to move to California. I should have known nothing good can come from Florida, especially something free.

I took a position as a writing intern at a production company that did two nationally televised shows. Sounds like a good idea right? They didn't tell me that the writing intern would be in the marketing department. That in itself isn't so bad, but after weeks of spending my days putting decals on walls, editing hours of footage on paper only for the editor to not receive my paper, researching social media events and trying figuring out the very flawed intranet, I realized this was probably not a good fit for me. I know that doing bitch work is the natural state of the intern, but when I found out that my ultimate goal in my internship was learning how to writing press releases, I knew that I was just wasting my time. I wrote press releases when I was a sophomore in high school. There was no way I was going to get shit on everyday only to "learn" how to do something that I can do in my sleep. Among all of the time wasted there, I did learn one thing...

One day when I was on my lunch break, I was treated to a real show. I was sitting in the parking lot eating my sandwich when I saw a white SUV rocking back and forth. At first I thought it was in my head, but upon further inspection, I saw that the SUV not six feet away from me was indeed sex rocking. I was going to move, but the last thing I wanted was for one of them to see me running away in the middle of having their midday snack. That's just rude. So that's when I stopped listening to my music and started listening to the natural ambience around me: the birds chirping, the wind blowing through the trees and the unmistakable sound of slurping that come from blowing something else. Maybe they really shouldn't have cracked the window...

When the rocking stopped, I decided to get up and throw my food away in the trash can across the parking lot. I didn't want to add to the awkwardness by being an arm length away when they come out of their traveling love den. Of course I had to see who had been my entertainment for the afternoon. A young blonde women plopped out of the vehicle. I remember seeing her a couple of days before working in the office next to mine with her boyfriend. Knowing this information, the situation became that much more awkward. While she had to take a leap of faith out of the vehicle, the NBA sized black man who I had never seen before stepped out of the SUV like it was a clown car.

That day, I learned that you can cheat on your significant when you work with them. Just make sure it's in the parking lot.

I watched her walk into the lobby, looking as if she had spent a weekend at sea with the Minnesota Vikings. As her boyfriend kissed her, I wondered if he was that oblivious, or if he was just used to the taste of dick in his mouth.



No comments:

Post a Comment