I Believe The Interns Are Our Future, or Wherein I Willfully Disturb the Intern

Female Intern continues to resist my efforts to crush her.

This does not dissuade me.

I’ve designated large blocks of time – particularly in the post-lunch lull from noon to 5:00 – for this quest.  I think it will look good on my self-appraisal this year.  The ability to strategize should not be taken lightly, and I think my boss will appreciate the choreography needed to squash the heartfelt sincerity of the newly hired.

The next step in my plot to break her spirit?

An introduction to the corporate detritus one collects over a lifetime of full-time work.  I’m going to stack the deck here, with both real and planted items. 

Real and planted. 

There is, after all, no point in letting an allegiance to the facts interfere with good, clean, intern-baiting.

I’ve arranged the contents of my top drawer for maximum effect.  There is, of course, the obligatory mattress-deep collection of Starbucks napkins and hundreds of tiny salt-and-pepper packets.  Any office worker worth their salt, so to speak, will have both of these in sufficient quantity to stanch the blood of a last-minute limb amputation or, alternatively, season/preserve said limb.

That’s just common sense.

But there are other items.  Items of foreboding.  Items of substance.

Items of doom. 

You don’t start out your corporate-like career with a bottle of Women’s One-A-Day in your office drawer.  Oh, noooo.  And when you were hired at, perhaps, the tender age of 19, there was no way to have foreseen the anti-anxiety prescription in your future or the spray can of Odor Eaters that would one day take up valuable desk real estate.

We'll let her find those.

We'll also let her find evidence of my WhiteOut addiction and a copy of my five-year plan to get out of office work and do something meaningful, dated January 1, 1988.

I'll let her find the Gold Bond Medicated Body Lotion that was purchased last winter.  Accidentally. 

With a coupon.

All she needs is a wee shove/phone call from me.

“Say, I know this is kinda last minute, but I’m in the Lake Superior Conference Room and I left a file I need in my top drawer.  Would you be willing to grab it for me?”

I’ll need to make a run to Target, of course.  There’s a package of Depends to buy, perhaps a tin of hard candy.

Oooh, and maybe a pamphlet linking chair width to the eventual size of one’s bottom.

There are just so many details when one works in an office.