my corporate summer

On my last day at the office, my co-workers and I went out to lunch together. At the lunch they presented me with a small going-away gift and a card. As I read the individual notes, I realized that although I had spent those months doing the tasks ‘no one else wanted to do,’ my work did not go unnoticed.

Get in at 8. Get the reports from the previous day at 9. Get the mail between 10 and 11, and sort through the packages until lunch. Then begins the post lunch countdown until my 4 o’clock freedom. This emerging pattern of predictability was dangerous.

My massive reception desk is really just a means of hiding the multiple large boxes and packages that come in daily. With the number of packages and boxes I take in, I could make a fort that rivals Buckingham Palace. I’m not quite sure if building forts is part of my job description, though.

While students work their way through summer, regular employees get back to the original purpose of summer and go on vacation. Due to this trade-off, I was recently assigned to assume the receptionist’s post for the remainder of my corporate summer while she jetted off for her family reunion in Lithuania.

I recently discovered that golf is more than a cultural pastime. It is also a corporate “get out of the office free” card. With the relationship between golf and business continuing to be hot and heavy, it looks like I’ll have to start learning how to swing a club if I ever want to be a Tiger in the corporate world.

After I finally finished stuttering through the list of phone calls and inputting all the incoming resumés, I discovered I had missed one crucial detail: I had to include each candidate’s title. I was able to determine the gender of the majority of the clients based on their names, but there still remained the puzzling few.

Before I could close the evidence of my mid-afternoon slacking, my boss’ face popped up above my cubicle wall. In an effort to distract him from my computer screen, I thrust my arm out to hand him the package. My arm hit a full glass of water, spilling its contents across my desk.

The office is laid out according to gender. This division of the sexes was unintentional, but it’s had a major impact on the office dynamic. My section of the office has five other women and one man. However, the boys regularly venture into the land of women so they can invite our solo male out for manly bonding.

My goal was to make the message sound like I am a competent IT professional who just happens to be away from her desk at the moment. This task was a difficult one because I am not an IT professional. I am a humanities student whose idea of high tech is limited to the newest version of Facebook.

I accidentally deleted 178 files from the company’s drive. After obsessively hammering Control-Z to try to undo my mistake, I faced a dilemma: do I tell my supervisor what I did, or just leave it in the hope that the files wouldn’t be missed?