Work: A Glossary of Related Terms [2011/06/20]

A note before reading: I am quite fond of my internship. The people are fantastic; my coworkers W and B are well-versed in sci-fi and YA fiction, my coworker JM speaks like, as B put it, "the verbal equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting," and N and M can go from N's sex life to quoting Cinderella in a single conversation. (They're not perfect, of course — I brought in homemade donuts and only half of them had been eaten by the end of the day. Who does that?)

Also, I love what I do. I'm not sure if I can explain how satisfying it can feel to strip a book of its cover, clean it, sew on new endsheets, make a new spine, and adhere the textblock back into the case, but it's definitely more fun than data entry.

(Plus, one lazy Friday afternoon left me with a new game: putting on the Glee channel on Pandora, and then matching songs to plotlines and characters. Note: only play this game when far, far away from people who won't mock you horribly for your knowledge.)

However, my sudden induction into the world of 9-to-5 and actual careers, coupled with my re-induction into the world of internships, has reminded me that no amount of enjoyment can stop me from poking fun at something, especially when it causes as many frustrations as work can. I just didn't want anyone to start thinking that I wasn't having a good time this summer.

Work: A Glossary of Related Terms

9-to-5: A curious phenomena of the working world, the 9-to-5 schedule seems designed to make the average worker slightly desperate to get home by the end of the day, and to drive said worker absolutely insane by the end of the week, when the tick of the clock signifying that you can go home sounds akin to a bell pealing the chimes of freedom.

However, if you're behind on a project, there will suddenly no longer be nearly enough hours in the day to complete said project – not, of course, that this is likely to keep a worker in the building any longer than absolutely necessary.

Commute: Hell. Guaranteed to make you wish that teleportation would spontaneously become possible, or, barring that, that everyone else in the world would simply cease to exist for approximately an hour. However, if you take public transportation, it can be an excellent time to to catch up on all the reading you had planned to do at the beginning of the summer, but which you haven't done since you keep wasting all your summer free time on your laptop. (Or is that just me?)

It is a well-known fact that as a species, we spend approximately a third of our lives asleep. To me, this is far less horrifying than the fact that I spend about one-twelfth of my day commuting, and will probably have spent $500 on the Metro by the time my internship comes to an end.

My day, in color.

Data Entry: Possibly the most boring task anyone can ever be assigned to do, ever. Avoid at all costs, unless you enjoy spending hours of your day hunched over a computer, typing in words and numbers that will eventually lose all meaning to you. (Luckily, I don't have to do any of that.)

Intern: Someone who is paid little/not at all, generally for doing the tasks that actual employees don’t really want to do.

Internship: The strange, nebulous space between being an employee and not working, in which you should always be aware that you are a temporary blip and that those around you will still be there after you are gone. This can make bonding with one’s coworkers an interesting experience. Not impossible, of course; I got along so well with the people at my last internship that I have a standing invitation to come visit, but it's very odd, trying to figure out how you fit into a dynamic that was established long before they had any idea that you existed.

Interning: The process of pretending that you are an employable human being, all for the sake of gaining job experience. [SEE: “job experience”.]

Job Experience: Things that will look impressive on your resume, so you can start the whole process over again in the hopes of actually stumbling across something to do for the rest of your life.