The grand finale

On his last day, he typed up letters for each of us. This was too awesome to not post here in its entirety. Click on the image below if the font is too small to read here.

The nickname! His first day here he told us to call him by his American first name. We said we would be happy to call him by his actual name. He said, no, no, the American name is fine.

Yet every email, phone call or voice mail from him during the entire internship was always, "hello, this is your intern, [asian name], [american name] [last name]." And if it was written, he always put the American name in quotes or parentheses.

I love how he is telling me what he did during his internship in the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs. I know what I assigned to you! Not only that, but he made the assignments sound much bigger than the mundane, simple tasks that I semi-trusted him to complete.

haha I am "demanding" - Apparently I'm the demanding one because I'm the only one that told him (multiple times) that his work needed to be fixed. The others just stopped giving him work.

Awesome voicemail

I got this voicemail from him on his last day. This sums up all that is The Intern pretty well...

Words of wisdom, part 2

On his last day he handed me his "files," which were manila folders - each of us in the department had one with our name on it. In Kasey's folder was this post-it note:

"usually very busy on phone calls"

Kasey being "very busy" was the reason why the intern ended up hovering around my door all the time asking me why she was so busy. Thanks Kasey, well played indeed...

Words of wisdom, part 1

The intern decided to "help" the next intern by leaving these gems of wisdom behind...

My favorites:

• "don't ask too many questions" - not sure where he got this idea from, but if he actually asked when he was confused at the start of an assignment, we could potentially have avoided the 15 rounds of re-explaining that it took for every little task we assigned to him. Or maybe cut it down to just 5 rounds of re-explaining...
• "make your bosses look good..." - Or, make your bosses look like the assholes that hired the creepy, awkward intern. That's almost the same thing, right??

Another gem on Facebook

He seems to have added this under the About Me section under Info:

"I am energetic, vibrant, creative, goal-oriented, problem solver, and most of all, one who can improve a team."

Energetic and vibrant are among the last words anyone would ever use to describe this kid.

And problem solving? Hmm, he couldn't figure out how to address an envelope, so I would also have to nix this one as well.

I'd hate to see what his weaknesses are...

Just saw this on his Facebook page under the spot where you can write something about yourself:

"Marketing Research is my strength."

I almost peed myself reading that

Feedback

His 2nd to last day we took him out to lunch.

While we were looking over the menus, he turns to Charles and asks, "Do you hit on waiters a lot?"

Charles decides to have fun with it and says, "Yeah, I hit them when
they get my order wrong."

Intern: "No, no. Hit on."

Me: He has quite a temper when they get an order wrong."

Intern: "No, no. Hit ON, you know, ask on date?"

Charles: " No, I'm married."

Intern: "Well what about before?"

WOW this kid doesn't let up when he thinks he's onto a good conversation topic.


I basically spent the entire lunch avoiding eye contact with Charles because I was afraid I would not be able to stop laughing.

Later on, the intern asked if we had any feedback for him on what he could improve. I said, "yes, everything" and then started laughing so he would think I was joking, and then quickly changed the subject.


I know what you are thinking. Is it wrong of me NOT to tell him that he sucks? Maybe, but why do I have to be the bad guy here? He already thinks that I'm the "demanding one," and do I really want to be the one he shoots first or mails the anthrax to?

I'm telling you, I don't think this kid would be all that stable in a stressful situation. The fact that he was leaving the internship quietly was a good sign and I wasn't about to change that.

Update!

Haven't updated in a while, but the intern's last day was last week. 2 weeks before that, we told him when his internship would be ending.

As soon as my manager gave him the news, I got this email from the intern:

Can I speak with you for a few minutes?
(as in the moment)

Not sure why he had to specify "in the moment" but I told him to stop by. He asked if he did anything wrong, and boy was it tempting to give him the laundry list. I couldn't bring myself to do it so I just said that there wasn't much work to give him at this point.

Which was true--there was no work for HIM, but if we had a competent intern there would have been plenty of work. Over the last few weeks all four of us had stopped giving him work because no one felt like wasting time re-explaining it 10 times only to have to fix it ourselves in the end.