Ranting about being an intern

Yeah, clean it bitch! This is how the regional manager started.

Our intern Fiona has done work experience at pretty much every company in Europe. If you’ve ever walked on a pavement, odds are she laid it, for zero money and very little enviable ‘experience’. So, obviously, she wants to rant about it…

I hate interning. I don’t get how companies can be persecuted for breaking minimum wage laws when the media industry can openly exploit people and pay them nothing just because they’re desperate. I’ve done so much work-experience that sometimes I feel like I’m just prostituting myself. Except I don’t get laid.

Here are my worst work experience placements:

Red Magazine

Magazines like these don’t really care if you learn anything or not. They just want you to make them tea and photocopy stuff and call things in. Unfortunately for them my PA skills are pretty much shit. But I stopped caring that I’d lost the contact information for the 10 pedometers I’d ordered after they sent me down to Elle magazine under false pretences to seal 500 envelopes.

Psychologies Magazine

I lasted about two days here. Psychologies magazine is like willingly slipping into a coma, safe in the knowledge you’re not missing out on anything.

TV production company

If we were in LA, and this production company were successful, and they had good ideas for TV shows and people actually wanted to audition for them and they didn’t look like they were about to go into administration, then this would have probably been a good opportunity. Instead, the ‘office’ was actually someone’s house, they didn’t have a fax machine and given that the woman in charge of me dressed like a hooker every single day I can only assume that either she’s really thought she had a glamorous job in television, or we really were in a brothel.

A Primary School

Kids say the funniest things, they really do. I did one day a week for about 6 months at a local primary school. One of the kids said the word “Fuck”, I told the teacher (he was only about 5) and she gave the whole class a lecture. Why did I rat on him? Because I knew there was fuck all he could do about it.

Vogue

I got told by an assistant at Vogue “We’ve had girls your age in before and they’re so slow I’ve had to stick a rocket up their ass,” and a finger down their throat to help them achieve perfection.

The Daily Telegraph

Working at a big corporate newspaper sounded like fun at first because everyone at these places has their hair slicked back and wears Bateman shirts and braces. But what wasn’t fun was the idea of having to pretend to give a shit about anything they had to say. This is because they can’t get over the fact that Margaret Thatcher’s career is over. I had to upload videos on to their website writing little captions like, “Margaret Thatcher = God”. After about a week I was told something like, “You’re too young to understand why we love her so much,” and then I was just told not to come back.