Hey, Is Anybody Watching the Interns?
School is out for the summer but in some cases, so are the bosses.
Alex Hyman pictured his summer internship being one part Entourage and one part The Office: people screaming into telephones Ari Gold superagent style, others menacing their desk mates as unnervingly as Dwight Schrute did at Dunder-Mifflin.
Instead, the office of his entertainment agency was mostly empty when Mr. Hyman, 20, arrived in early June, on the day he had been told to report to the Los Angeles location. He waited outside a locked door until a colleague found him and explained that his boss was working from home. Mr. Hyman was dropped off in a conference room with his fellow interns. They spent the day navigating Excel and joking about it. (Whats an Excel joke? How do you not know how to use Excel, Mr. Hyman said, insisting it was funny at the time.)
I think everyone is a little nervous for the first day on a job, Mr. Hyman laughed. This definitely threw a curveball in what I was expecting.
Summer interns generally are aware of what awkward rites of passage await them. Most have to attend their share of stilted happy hours and softball games. They might have to nod their way through a brown bag lunch. Now, though, interns experience a strange new introduction to professional life. Working a summer job can mean commuting to an empty office, sitting unsupervised with other interns and trying desperately to impress managers over video calls. School is out for the summer but in some cases, so are the bosses.
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