May 28th

After a frenzied 20 minutes of early morning reports, we interns peeled off to the W.P. Chrysler museum for an indulgent breakfast of BAGELS! and muffins. When I had my orientation there were 30 interns trolling the room, lackadaisical in their approach to brown-nosing; there was not a broken spirit among them. Now, we number 60, and more then half of us harbor the kind of spite that can only be bred in 21^st century working conditions. During the first couple of weeks, all we could do was complain about how we were expected to take 2 hours of work and stretch it into an eight hour day, every day. Now, if any of us is asked to do anything that we haven’t done up to this point in our young careers, the bitching and bemoaning of management is only surpassed by the feeling that our universe has fallen prey to the hawk called Entropy.

We had a mini-conference where we were taught how much Chrysler cares about going green, how much they care about customer service and how much their interns mean to them. I figured they had about $600,000 worth of worthless interns in the room, so it was appropriate when we spend 20 minutes doing a team building exercise involving pipe cleaners. The pale faced leader of the presentation then told us how his leadership style was that of a cheetah: family oriented, speedy, agile, and predatory.

They gave us markers and half a sheet of paper to write down what kind of leaders we were… This is what I wrote.

What kind of leader are you?

A CRAFTY, RAPACIOUS

GROUND HOG

When the lady collected my card, a few kids in my row saw my writing and busted out laughing. The main guy started reading responses, droning on and on about being “morally focused, enthusiastic, charismatic, enrapturing, and respected.” All of a sudden, he sees my barbaric scrawl reading “Crafty Ground Hog,” and pauses. The guy to my left is writhing in his chair, and my face is turning red, but the guy handles it well and just moves on to read the next generic statement. Only a crafty ground hog could get away with writing the only non-serious statement in a room full of comparatively hard-edged malcontents. Up to that point, I think I had been known as the guy who had a fever last week. At least now I’ve laid brick for future traversing on Intern Mountain.

Aside from the breakfast, this day has been quick and unproductive. Sal is gone, apparently because a tire blew up in his wife’s face when she was trying to inflate it. Nobody else dares handle me without oven mitts or a bee suit, so I have once again effectively slipped through the teeth and disappeared straight into the mouth of the enemy.