Got Interns?

I know I have mentioned an obscene amount of times on this blog just how much work I’ve been doing since I got promoted in February, so I apologize but it has to be done again. I have a lot of work. One might even say that I was being overworked. So instead of quitting (which was ‘Plan A’), I asked The Boss if I could hire an intern (which was ‘Plan B’). My wishes were granted in the form of our new intern for the sales and marketing departments. This means I have to share her with the sales team which is fine as long she knows I like my coffee black, piping hot with a pinch of sugar (just kidding – I don’t even like coffee nor would I make her serve me like that).

I have spent my fair share of time serving as an intern – and I use the term ‘serve’ because being an intern is almost synonymous with being a personal slave. Or at least that has always been my take on it since my internships were always at small publications where there were no mail room coordinators, no copy machines, no secretaries to answer the phones and therefore I became the resident secretary/personal assistant/editorial assistant.

But even though my three-two days a week in the office were crazy busy and I sometimes had to do hard manual labor (like schlep around the city buying baby supplies for my editor’s pending trip to Barbados or the times I had to walk many, many avenues to Staples to get paper for the printer/fax machine and then literally strap said paper to my back for my walk back to the office), I wouldn’t give them up because of how much I learned and the relationships I formed.

So I’m hoping this is how my new intern (my very own intern!) will view her internship in a few years down the road as she reminisces about her time underneath my wing learning the ropes of marketing. And in this case, the ropes is entering data and doing all the projects I don’t feel like doing. Like last week she entered almost 2,000 names into our newsletter database because The Boss determined that I didn’t have time to do it. Enter intern to do the dirty work for me.

I felt like I was coming-of-age in the working world when the new intern started two weeks ago mainly because I was no longer at the bottom of the corporate food chain. Now when the President of our company needs her magazines alphabetized while she is at a conference in Australia, I won’t be the youngin called in to bat. The intern will take it from there.

I’m not just excited about having a new wingman at work to help me out with all the boring and tedious projects that get thrown my way, but I also get to (in a very minor role) be able to practice managing someone’s work. For instance, if I give my intern a project and she does it incorrectly, I will be the one to blame. If my intern is sitting at her desk doing homework, then it’s me that gets put on the chopping block. While this is a scary thought, it’s also somewhat exciting. She’s my responsibility and if I do a good job of making sure she does her work correctly and on time then I get a gold star.

I was also not-so-secretly hoping for a new friend in my new intern – one who might be able to tell me all about her college exploits, the fun bars she went to over the weekend, the new cocktails she created with her girlfriends in the dorm – but alas, my new intern seems more like a ‘do her homework on Saturday night’ kind of girl. She’s quiet, avoids chit-chat and gets right to business. On the one hand, this is great because I know I won’t have to walk by her work space once an hour to make sure she’s not checking Perez every five minutes because, unlike me, she seems to be completely 100% committed to her internship and not celebrity gossip.

On that note, I'm going to have my intern put together some media kits so I have more time read about Owen Wilson and Kate Hudson's (on again) budding romance.