Last year at this time I wrote a tongue-in-cheek Notebook about the lessons I learned from working in corporate America during my summer internship. This summer I served a second internship at the same company, which remains nameless to protect the innocent. Naturally, my coworkers there begged me to write another piece about my experiences. So, for them, here it is:
Lesson #1: Don’t be better than your boss at anything, especially trivia contests.
Lesson #2: If you happen to work for a defense contractor and you accidentally lose a file or blueprint, blame it on the "spies."
Lesson #3: Staff meetings are more fun if you think of them as group hugs.
Lesson #4: The best revenge for talented folks who get laid off is to start their own small business, and then to have their ex-employer have to contract from said business after discovering how invaluable they are.
Lesson #5: Coffee is your friend.
Lesson #6: Phone numbers assigned to interns have a 99.9 percent likelihood of having formerly been phone numbers assigned to fax machines. (The corollary to this lesson is, if your voice mail has 24 new messages and it’s only your second week on the job, 23 of those messages go something like this: "beep … beep … beep.")
Lesson #7: You can in fact charge for tickets to seats at your cubicle if said cubicle happens to be across the aisle from the manager’s thinly-walled conference room.
Lesson #8: Data is only valuable if you dress it up prettily and have it do the hula and sing show tunes while riding around the meeting room on trained dogs and ponies.
Lesson #9: Working for a corporation is like going to the theatre—it’s more fun if you can suspend your disbelief.
And finally, Lesson #10, also known as the serious lesson: Great coworkers make a great internship. Thanks, everyone over there at the nameless company, for a great summer (you know who you are).
