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Counsel from a One-Time Intern
By Sarah Stodola
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The following is a mostly accurate description of the summer of 1998:
Four days per week, I took the 1/9 subway from 116th street to midtown. I walked five minutes in an easterly direction, mesmerized by this New York City place that up until then I had really only heard about. I had not yet learned to be bothered by the crowds and the heat and the pushiness. I then entered a building – a skyscraper, no less - flashed my very official ID, and hopped on the elevator.
I would spend the ensuing seven hours or so opening other people’s mail, answering other people’s phones (ohmygod – not much has changed in the past five years!), checking my email, following the real employees around, and fetching people’s lunches. I shared a desk with a couple of others, which meant sometimes I didn’t even have enough privilege to check email. I’m pretty sure most of the people in the office never knew my name. Once, I put roughly 2,000 videotapes in alphabetical order. Oh and also, I stalked Conan O’Brien and Matt Lauer.
But I pretended to not stalk them, but rather to accidentally run into them and be unmoved by the occurrence, because I felt I was above such actions as stalking celebrities.
You know, as an NBC intern.
Because NBC interns are huge. Haven’t you heard?
Yes, The Today Show has recently deemed NBC interns worthy of their own Apprentice rip-off. Eight NBC interns have been competing for four slots on a “special assignment” for NBC News, I think it is. NBC interns have all of a sudden become visible.
Which I find hilarious, being that it was precisely that internship that made me realize how not interested a television career I actually was, and this was in large part because the people who did all the work were always invisible.
On the other hand, the internship provided an ideal introduction to New York; complete lack of any real responsibility, parental subsidies, access to high profile people and locations. It would also make my ensuing senior year of college an exercise in frustrated, aching anticipation as I plotted to get out of Indiana and into a place where things actually happened.
But for this current crop of interns, there is more at stake, it would seem. Not only do they risk all hellfire if they answer the phone and don’t realize that the Peter Greenberg on the other end of the line is the NBC travel guru (Once, while working the door of a certain club at which I used to hostess, I was yanked from the position for failing to recognize the Smashing Pumpkins. This is a theme with me), they also risk national embarrassment at the hands of one Mr. Donald Trump. I doubt any of them had any notion at all when they began their internships that they may be thrust onto national television. If their predecessors had offered any indication, they would spend four months being bored silly and cold (it’s true, television studios are really, really cold). Instead, they became reality television stars.
So I missed the boat; just one more piece of evidence that I am older than I should be. Or else evidence that thank god I am not 21 right now.
I don’t want to be on TV, but I am the exception in the world of broadcast journalism - a fact which requires no explanation. Because I am weird, I would rather toil away anonymously at this keyboard than pursue real, actual face-recognition. But most network television interns relish the spotlight, which is why they are pursuing a career in television, which is why they are more than likely ecstatic about The Intern.
But when it’s all over, and you are back at the shared computer in the least enviable cubicle in Rockefeller Center, just remember guys, Peter Greenberg is the travel guru.
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Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three. She can be contacted at sstodola@methree.net.
©
2004 Me Three