LAUGHS FOR MARKS!

OF BOSSES AND PARENT PRIVILEGES!

Honestly, I thought fake laughing was only reserved for parents, at that time when you want to ask for money knowing very well that there are very slim chances of that happening. Alas! I was super wrong, bosses are like sixth parents after aunties, older siblings, neighbours, and the elderly in the bus; especially if you are on internship. And they are not just ordinary parents like all these other parents.  They are parents without responsibilities, just privileges and believe me, those privileges are used up to exhaustion.

There is no problem with being sent on little errands like fetching water, exchanging the phone on a charger with a power bank, or passing on a pen. In those little areas, I scored 100% no doubt because I did them to perfection. No grumbling. No inside cursing. I could even have offered to comb some wigs I saw in the office which looked like Michelangelo's Horned Moses.

 But;

Certain errands certainly went beyond official office courtesy. And I say this here that even though I vowed not to be anyone’s version of an office tea-girl, I did those errands, not diligently and with so much grumbling in my heart that I could have been on the Grinch’s ‘Who’s Next’ list. Now; now, I should be ashamed of such confessions but no I am not because I am not okay with being sent in dingy corridors where men in woollen hats in summer want to grab your behind, I am not of the view that it is any boss’ privilege to send an intern to collect Avon debts and orders during office hours and I am not okay with going to a service provider’s 3 days in a row just to register a boss’ personal SIM card.

For marks! For marks, these are the kind of things interns do for marks without ever letting on that they are not okay with it.

 

LAUGHS FOR MARKS!

If bosses have privileges, what do interns have? Responsibilities, yes!

One thing I am certain that I learnt is that not all my responsibilities were equal. Other responsibilities are bigger than others and you would never guess what the biggest responsibility that you would have to do diligently, without fail and making sure that the boss sees you doing it perfectly is. Because it should not be a responsibility, to begin with.  Laughing at the boss’ not-so-funny daddy jokes should not be a responsibility but in this internship world, it is the greatest responsibility.

I had this one boss who also happened to be the boss that mattered. Here is the thing with an internship, everyone is a boss in their rights but there is only one boss who matters, The Boss. 10 minutes into the office on my first day I knew that if there was any slight chance of getting sick, this man was the medicine because laughter is medicine or so the supposedly wise say. My boss had jokes as dry as those of my high school history teacher, most of them bordered on misogyny and sometimes even crossed the line to tribalism. On worst days they were very much elitist and sometimes too ghetto, jokes I would never laugh at even in the dark, far from the crowds. But I laughed so hard anyway because hanging on to that laughter was my internship marks and comments. I do not blame them at all, that is who he was, a man who laughed about everything and anything, who got so excited over very little things and whose humour knew no boundaries on who his audience was or whose feelings he was trampling on. And I helped him be that person with the insensitive daddy jokes because I laughed so hard for marks.

One of the bosses I was assigned to for a few weeks also thought he was extremely funny. This, I have noticed is a tendency that is very common among me. A man is either funny or he thinks he is funny, there is no in-between. And the ones who think they are funny, try hard to be weird. This was my boss and because he was not funny, he tried to be fun about the only thing men try to be funny about sex! Every single little joke he made had some sexual connotation and every little attempt at casual talk ended up relationship ended up as sex education.

Compromise! You compromise on a lot of things on internship, I know I compromised my sense of humour for a whole 3 months.

You all overly talk about sex for marks, well; laughs for marks are a thing too!

Till next time.