the new alphabetization scheme, the identical twin caper, and other stories of summer internships

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

Last week we talked about summer interns, and these are 12 of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The bookshelves

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.

2. The identical twins

Years ago, I worked in a department store 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.

3. The naps

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. The hole

I worked at a national park, as a natural resources intern, for $15 a day and 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!

5. The black mold

We had a year-long intern through a program that placed interns from a particular European country in U.S. 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 eight 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.

6. The non-competition

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 two or three, then get mad at me for not doing anything even though I had finished everything I was assigned. The office supervisor was rarely on-site 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 my 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!

7. The wrong job

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.

8. The parties

I worked for a large company, close to 5,000 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 one party per day.

9. The assignment

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.

10. More napping

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.

11. The Spiderman

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.

12. The successful coaching

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.