My life as an Intern

This is my blog about my internship right after college graduation, summer of 2007. It was the worst job I've ever had...and I've had some really bad ones. More on the others soon!

I’m an intern. It’s true. At least, I was an intern. Currently, the state of my employment is questionable at best.

I went to college for four years, got two degrees, and the best job I could get was an internship at an engineering firm doing CRM work. For those of you out there who aren’t archaeologists, and I’m guessing that’s probably the majority, that stands for Cultural Resource Management. I know it sounds exciting. “What could be better?” you say. Of course, what you’re really wondering is, “What the hell does that mean?”

Don’t feel silly. You’re not alone. I’ll give you the nutshell version of Cultural Resources. The company where I am questionably employed gets contracts from various companies or government agencies to do all sorts of things from widening roads to building buildings. Before the work can be done, however, we have to make sure that the ground we’re about to tear apart doesn’t contain any archaeologically significant artifacts. Basically, we go out and survey (look around and dig little holes called “shovel tests”) and/or dig (actually excavate in much larger square holes) to see if at any time in the not-so-recent past there could have been a Native American occupation in this ground. Usually we don’t find anything. No one wants us to find anything anyway.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way (and you’ve had a nap from the sheer boredom of it all), I’ll tell you all about a typical day in my life as an intern. Try not to piss your pants from excitement.

First of all, I want to explain that I was forced to dress up…to go to my job as an archaeologist (we dig in the dirt, people, c'mon). Yeah, so that sucked. Except that I really like to wear my dress-up shoes, though I don’t like what they do to my feet. But I digress. So I had to get up in the morning and get all dressed up and pretty to go to work.

Most of my work was done in the lab. For my first three or four weeks, this consisted of data entry. I didn’t know it at the time, but I should have cherished this activity. My typical day usually consisted of labeling folders and making copies and putting dirty pieces of paper in plastic sheet protectors. And this would be for all eight hours, everyday. I know what you’re thinking. Quit my bitching, right? At least it’s a job. It’s a valid point. But let me go into a little more detail.

One day, the third in a row of folder labeling, I began to wonder how much I was actually writing. If I were to go by the constant shooting pain from my hand all the way up to my elbow, I would have to admit it was a lot. So I counted the number of words I had to write on each folder - nine. And I had to label over 2000 folders. In about ten days. Yeah, that’s a lot of words. This was in addition to all the pages that had to be numbered. Page 1 of 537, Page 2 of 537, etc. You get the idea. And all of this had to be done by hand with a pencil on special acid-free folders.

Then all the pages had to be copied. No big deal, right? It wouldn’t have been a big deal at all, if I could have just loaded the pages into the top of the copy machine and pressed the button. But no. The Lab Manager (otherwise referred to as “Plain and Dry”) decided that the pages all had to be sheet-protectored first. It’s a verb, trust me. So I had to stand at the copy machine for 16 hours and make four copies of each page one at a time. All so I didn’t get the copy machine dirty. Afterwards, I would go home and cry. And massage my aching extremities.

Sometimes, on magical days, I would get to go out and do field work. These days were by far my favorite. Bones and I would go to exotic places like Sanger or Carrollton. Once we even got to go to Harlingen. Even the day that I was a complete idiot and wore shorts into the Sangervian jungle, where I was attacked by poisonous plants and insects, was better than all my days in lab. These lab bitches are crazy. They spend hours upon hours trying to figure out where some miniscule and insignificant piece of clear glass was made. All the while, I am killing forests of paper trees to make copies of crap that no one will ever look at again.

Last week, they told me they don’t have any work for me to do this week. No warning, no notice, nothing. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? Just sit around and wait for them to call me in while I have the Money Fairy pay my bills? Not that they were paying me enough to cover my bills anyway. It’s the principle of the thing.

So I’m out looking for a job. If anyone knows of anything a girl with nice boobs and not many useful job skills can do, let me know!