the completely fake project, the company-wide nap schedule, and other stories of summer interns

Earlier this month, we talked about summer interns, and here are 12 of my favorite stories you shared. (Note that we are laughing with these interns, not at them. We have all been this young and inexperienced at some point.)

1. The disappearance

We had an intern go missing in a large U.S. City, away from home office. FINALLY got a hold of him after upteen voicemails/ texts. Turns out, he used our trip to meet up with a girl he knew in high school. We told him he either flew back with us, or forfeited his ticket home and was on his own. He chose to stay.

2. The nap schedule

One year the interns accidentally (?) published a company-wide public Microsoft Calendar of their nap schedule to take naps in the nursing mothers/meditation room.

While it was happening, no one could figure out why no one could access that room during the day. Until the calendar was found.

3. The expanding foam

I’ve only known one intern to get outright fired.

He was helping the facilities engineers with some maintenance on an industrial expanding-foam injection gun; imagine a much larger, stickier, denser version of the “Great Stuff” style foam you would use to seal gaps around a door frame.

The real engineers had to divert to an emergency call before the job was done, and told Intern that the tool was very expensive and complicated and that he should wait for them to return and should absolutely not touch it while they were gone.

He decided to ignore this and impress everybody with his Gumption! and brilliance by continuing to tinker with the equipment himself.

The end result was a ball of expanding foam the size of a Volkswagen, with the injection gun buried somewhere in the middle of it.

4. The Halloween decorations

Not an intern, and not exclusively in the summer, but an undergrad student working in an academic lab (which is the academia equivalent of an unpaid intern, I suppose).

She was very enthusiastic about holidays and wanted us to be more “festive” in decorating. Near Halloween, she showed up to the lab with a carved pumpkin and a candle to spruce the place up. She was very miffed that she couldn’t a) light a *real* candle in a lab chock-a-block full of flammable chemicals and b) leave a slowly rotting gourd in our very much indoor lab for multiple weeks…

That, along with some other lab safety issues, meant that she was shuffled off to another lab in the department that dealt with significantly lower chemical hazards than us. Everyone was much happier with that arrangement!

5. The fabrication

From the academic side of internships. I helped create an undergrad major that a semester long internship junior or senior year that had a heavy academic component, e.g., in the field four days and then on Friday seminars where they linked their experience with the subject matter of their program and created integrative papers, and projects which were eventually presented to a wide audience. They also kept analytic journals where they applied reflective steps to what they were doing.

One student fabricated it all: the journals, the examples for analysis, etc. They only caught them when the director of the program ran into the person running the nonprofit where the student interned and commented on the terrific experience they were having. The director had never met the student. Further investigation showed they were in fact fabricating everything. And this was before AI made this even easier.

Obviously there should have been contact between college and agency routinely, but the person supervising had been reading and discussing the experience with the student and did not undertake that step.

6. The improvement

We had an intern who informed us with great confidence that the ERP system the university used wasn’t very well written, and he’d put together something that should work better, so who would he talk to about replacing SAP with the javascript app he’d cobbled together in a week.

7. The streaks

Maybe six or seven years ago, weird, dark streaks appeared on a couple different walls in our office. Each streak was maybe a foot tall, but nearly two feet long. The streaks appeared out of nowhere, but grew darker and more pronounced over the course of the summer. Near the end of the summer, staff scrubbed away the marks — but not before we realized the cause.

An intern had been handling newspapers and print publications, and his hands were grimy. He would just … rub his hands along the length certain (random?) walls as he walked by. Over and over again. All summer. The height/length of the marks depended on how close he was to the wall and how long he would drag his ink-stained hands across the surface. Wash your hands, people!

8. The dress code

My old company’s one and only intern had to be told not to wear mini skirts and extremely high heels to the office. She tried to argue this, her argument was “But I look really good!”. A few weeks later she showed up in PJs. Her argument was “I sit in the back row, no one is going to notice.” She was extremely grumpy about being sent home to change that day.

9. The disappearance, part 2

We invited our new intern to join our annual planning workshop at company headquarters, which was a short flight to a large U.S. city. Intern left our group dinner on day one and we never saw him again. Someone overheard him on the phone saying he was excited to meet up with a childhood buddy that night. He sent a text the following morning that he was sick and would join midday. He never showed up or communicated with us again. We had a small hope he would at least be at the airport for the return flight three days later.

Our manager was told by HR she needed to stay in company HQ city so we could ensure that this kid got back safely since we were obligated to get him home. After day five, she was able to hand over responsibility to someone at HQ and return home.

HR notified his emergency contact per protocol. When we inquired about notifying the police, HR said the intern had been in contact with his brother and was posting to social media so there was no reason to believe he was in danger. I believe he is still living his best life partying it up in Minneapolis four years later.

To this day, every trip to HQ gets the comment that “Maybe you’ll run into Joey on the train/bus/coffee.” Oh and interns are not allowed to travel with us anymore.

10. The birthday

My intern works part-time, two full days and Friday is a half day. Since Thursday was his 21st birthday and we’re in the U.S., I told him if he wanted to shift those hours to the afternoon, we could do that as a little birthday treat. He, having spent most summers with the European half of his family and feeling he’s familiar with drinking, said he would be fine. He underestimated the power of an American 21st birthday.

On Friday, I heard from him about 2 pm. He apologized profusely via text — he got home at 7am and was still unwell and he thinks his mom might have called? From what I can piece together listening in to him and some junior team members since then, he woke up on a friend’s lawn at daylight, in that fun still-drunk-but-also-now-hungover state, then stumbled home to continue suffering in bed.

I spoke with him his first day back, and we agreed that the lessons learned were not to over-drink, and either plan the birthday party for a Friday night, or take the day after off work preemptively. Luckily he is an intern, so all it means is he’ll have to deal with gentle ribbing all summer while he repairs our impression of him. But he’s already doing work a bit more advanced than we thought we’d get out of him, so as long as he lays off the midweek parties, he should be fine.

11. The wooden ball

I worked for a childcare center located at a large university for staff, professors, admins, grad students, etc. Over the slow summer months between semesters, we hired interns from the school of education on campus to work as assistant teachers. Most of them were amazing, loved kids, and were just thrilled to get experience and mentorship in a real classroom, but there were always a few … outliers, shall we say.

One summer, I had an intern so unenthusiastic and disengaged, Rachel, that I sometimes wondered if she had a pulse. I honestly considered asking her why she was pursuing education at all, as she seemed both uninterested and unfamiliar with children and how they work, as evidenced by The Wooden Ball Conundrum of 2021.

We had a ramp set with wooden golf-ball sized balls that the kids loved, but required a fair level of supervision from adults. They were HARD and if thrown, could really do some damage. One busy morning, I noticed a child ominously tossing one of the wooden balls around, dangerously close to his peers’ heads and to our glass tank full of hermit crabs. My spidey sense was tingling for potential disaster. I was managing 15 other things, so I called to Rachel, “Hey, please go tell J to give you that wooden ball because it belongs in the block area for safety.”

She sighed heavily and ambled over to him. A minute later, she came back to me, empty-handed. I asked her where the ball was and she said, “He said no.” With a shrug. I was baffled and I think I said something like, Wwhat??? You’re the adult and it’s a classroom rule?”

Of course he said no! Kids often say no! All the time! Unreasonably! It’s your job to keep them safe anyway! You cannot let a four-year-old outwit you! She also fell asleep every day during nap time, alongside the kids. I hope she changed majors.

12. The hero

I was the notorious summer intern.

Years ago, I was an intern in the compliance department of a massive company in the manufacturing industry. While I was waiting to catch a ride home, I saw a guy clearly struggling with PowerPoint. I offered to help, and he took me up on it—but every time I fixed the issue and walked away, he messed something else up and hollered “Hey, intern!” across the open office to get me to come back.

After about the fourth round of this, I turned and said, ““You’re acting like a real asshole. I’m a human being and deserve to be treated with respect.” I told him this was the last time I was going to fix it and that if he wanted it to keep working, he needed to turn around and walk away from the screen.

Cue silence. Turns out he was a Very. Important. Executive. And to make things worse? My dad worked in management at the same company. Everyone, including the exec, started calling my dad to gossip about the event. I still can’t visit without someone telling this story.

Thankfully, everyone agreed the guy had always been a jerk. He was told, more or less, that if he didn’t like being called out by a tiny teenage girl, maybe he should change his attitude.

Fast-forward a year: he was not-so-politely asked to leave the company. I was the lucky intern assigned to pack up his desk and ship the boxes overseas—to the only place that would still hire him.

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