I’m sitting at my desk, counting the seconds until five o’clock hits, and then BAM, I’m out of here. Not that I hate working; I just hate being bored and listless. All I’ve done all day is refill the printer with paper so that terribly frustrating red light would stop blinking and package some old ink cartridges so the UPS man deliver them to the recycling plant. I cleared out all my emails, all 1,758 of them, and carefully categorized the ones that I so generously showed mercy to. I am productive.
But seriously. I need something intellectually stimulating; I can’t just keep on sitting here. I was actually excited when someone asked me to make a copy of some bank statements. Woohoo. But complaining won’t change anything; at the end of the day, I am still an intern, making minimum wage. This job was the result of a last minute scramble when I realized that I had nothing to put on my college resume, or at least, nothing of importance. A few seasons of miscellaneous sports, minor leadership positions, one or two pieces of papers that claim to be awards but actually stand for nothing: that is all I have to account for three years of high school.
Of course, I don’t intend to sit at a desk all my life, filing expense reports and running errands. Someday, I will do great things, be a criminologist, an aerospace engineer, a microbiologist maybe. I could design cars, defend against the prosecution, drive a limousine. But that’s all then, and this is now. Now, I am a lowly employee attempting to amuse myself with the sparse idiosyncrasies of a drab office; work is never as fun as Steve Carrel makes it seem. I don’t know what I would do without minimum wage.