• The Cosmic Avenger I’ve only had one intern, and she was great. So great that I recommended her for a full-time position with a VPand she quit shortly after taking said position. I was upset, but that’s hardly a horror story. I think she just had her eye on a career in a different industry, and didn’t have the maturity to say that outright. I also was an “intern” briefly, but after being dumped in the shipping department and told to take care of everything on my own after a day or two of chasing people down to ask what the hell I should do, I complained to the owner (very small business), who screamed at me how grateful I should be (basically “do you know who we are?!?” speech), at which point I walked out. • A brand new co-op student (kind of an intern, right?) once came into our lunch room for the first time, listened to about 10 minutes of our usual conversation (sport, major world events, Game of Thrones and other TV), and announced that those topics didn’t interest her and that we should be talking about classical music instead. One of my colleagues asked how that would go, and in a very condescending tone she said, “well, if I was to say the name Beethoven, would you know who I meant?” After that we basically ignored her and went back to our favourite theories about Jon Snow.

Ive been running MC6.5 on my desktop no probs - just upgraded my laptop install to 6.5 from 6.0.1. Trying to activate it using the same codes (im using the serial) and the licence control app is giving me: 101 activation failed seat count failed on system IDxxxxx. I remembered to deactivate my desktop so Im.

• Victoria Nonprofit (USA) My worst intern was pretty tame, compared to the stories I’m sure we’ll hear today. He was just generally unprofessional, although he did his job really, really well, so his manager (my direct report) struggled with how to handle him.

His worst/best day was on the first day of the Egyptian uprising during the Arab Spring. He didn’t show up for work, and didn’t call. After 30 minutes or so of waiting, we called him.

He answered and unabashedly told me that he wasn’t coming in that day because “as a political science major, it’s more important for me to watch the news about the Egyptian revolution.” Oh, dear sweet white boy. His manager was Egyptian. She was at work. I don’t actually remember how we handled it. He did end up on a PIP, but I don’t remember if that was the catalyst. • Jessica (tc) The first time I watched Office Space I could not figure out why anyone thought it was funny. I was tense and upset and really stressed by the dysfunction at the office.

The next time I watched it, I worked somewhere else and found it hilarious. Apparently working for jerks makes fake jerks unfunny. I also cannot watch What About Bob, because Bob stresses me out too much and I don’t find his antics amusing.

If I have seen a show before and I know that someone will be made a fool of (they are being cheated on and everyone else knows, for example) or majorly embarrassed by something or someone in the episode, I can’t watch it again. If I have to for some reason, I just wait the whole show, on edge and feeling sorry for the person who is going to have to deal with that (and I kind of hate the people putting him/her through it). I don’t understand why people treat others that way, and I think I empathize too much with certain situations.

I am so glad I’m not the only one who has these moments when it comes to “entertainment” that I know isn’t real in the least. My friends just think I’m weird. • I was temping part-time at an old job when 9/11 happened–we did NO work that day and someone had brought in a small TV.

So all we did was watch Dan Rather all day. At 2:00, a special edition of the newspaper came out, so I ran out and got a copy of it, and a big thing of chocolate chip cookies for everyone.

The phone only rang twice. I remember being creeped out by how quiet everything was. Traffic had gotten light because everyone was inside, watching or listening to the news, and of course no planes or helicopters or anything. That freaked me out a little–that flights were grounded at ALL airports, including our tiny, insignificant, doofus one in the middle of nowhere. Weirdest workday ever. • Artemesia We had two former interns in the building that day in their shiny new New York job; they didn’t make it out.

We had several other interns in the area but none of them got caught up in it. One horrible thing was that the fraternity brothers announced to everyone that their brother had been rescued and were interviewed in the local paper about this great escape while the parents were at home in agony knowing that he had not gotten out. Lots of rumors about that day that caused a lot of pain. • Mel in HR I also was in high school, just outside of DC at the time. One history class saw the second plane hit when they did their morning routine of watching the news and discussing it.

They didn’t put us on lockdown and simply sent out an announcement saying the Pentagon had been bombed and the phone lines were down. My dad and my best friend’s dad worked in the Pentagon so we were freaking out. When school let out, they told us to go straight home. Of course, my best friend and I walked to school so we had to run home. Her dad survived because he had been running late that day and got stuck in traffic.

My dad was in a building in Pentagon city and felt the rumble of the plane flying over, followed by seeing the explosion. He was immediately evacuated. It was such a creepy day.

• I used to work at an organization that hired high school co-ops, university co-ops, and interns, all of whom were well paid. We had some great students, and some of them went on to be hired for a permanent job once they graduated, but there were some that weren’t so great. 1) Summer student #1 had been a high school co-op with us, and my manager was good about working around her school schedule. We hired her for the summer. She took a couple of days off with approval, and then called in on a Friday to announce she was going out of town to attend a school-related event (it might have been a course of some sort – it wasn’t frivolous) and would be gone for the next two weeks out of an 8 week summer job. We did not hire her the next year.

2) Co-op #1 was hired to work on some projects, but he didn’t really like doing them. He did, however, like creating a webpage that counted how many seconds you had been viewing it, and shared that with the team. He did not come back and got a bad review. (I’m not sure how actively he was managed during his term – it’s possible his manager could have done a better job there, but it’s also possible that he just didn’t care.). • Snarkus Aurelius We had an intern whose mom was BFF with the Boss. The parents set up a three week internship for this 19 year old woman.

Here are a few problems. 1) While trying to figure out availability, the intern’s mother called our office and said all communication should go through her because her daughter was in the middle of finals week and shouldn’t be bothered. 2) The intern’s mother brought her to work and picked her up every day. As inwalked the intern in, left, returned, and waited in the front office for her child at the end of the day. 3) The day before the internship started, the intern and her mom stopped. Her mother responded for her every time I asked the intern a direct question.

4) Every single item of the intern’s clothing barely covered her butt. One item was see through. 5) One of the intern’s responsibilities was to answer the phones. She cried on the second day when she received a distressing call.

(Our office got a lot of those. We told her that.) She called her mother, and her mom showed up immediately. 6) Intern’s mother attended her daughter’s party at the end of the internship. Her mother was in every photo. We might as well have had two interns because I felt like I had to manage both of them. I weep for our future. • Jenna Maroney It is interesting and something I’ve observed working with younger kids that from the outside, things like helicopter parenting/indulgence and toxicity/abuse can look very similar.

I wince whenever I hear someone say for example that because someone gets very emotional when they screw up or are reprimanded, they must have been coddled by their parents. Or, maybe their parents berated or injured them for mistakes of all kinds and they subconsciously associate error with danger/shame/etc. Excessive support is not the only way to deprive a child of developing emotional resources to cope with hardships (even minor ones). • Abyssal I’m reluctant to view helicopter parenting as indulgence — having come from a background with helicopter parents, it was pretty much the opposite. I had to be involved in everything and be the best at everything I was involved in. There were months at a time during the school year when I wouldn’t get home until 11pm, and I was getting up at 5:30am for my before-school activities. Everything was checked, and if I got less than 100% on any test, I had to talk through it with my father and explain exactly what I got wrong and how I was going to bring up my grade.

It might not be outright abuse, but it really is toxic as all get-out. You’re terrified to set a foot wrong, and the strategies for dealing with that kind of an atmosphere are incredibly maladaptive once you get out from under it. It took me years to really convince my gut that it was better to tell my boss “Hey, I made a mistake here, this is what I think we can do to fix it” instead of desperately trying to bury my wrongdoing. • Abyssal I saw the Slate article a few days ago, and found it profoundly unsurprising.

I had one semester of fantastically high performance in college as I maintained my momentum from high school, and then depression set in and I basically fell apart, started refusing to leave my room, having panic attacks, the whole nine yards. I had no survival skills for pulling myself together because I’d never been able to collapse before and so I didn’t know how to handle it. It’s a terrible thing, and I wish that kind of treatment were more broadly recognized as abusive.

• Anonsie Absolutely. With some of the folks I grew up with whose families were like this, some were outright abusive (to the extent that my parents and others actually called in complaints to protective services several times throughout my childhood on different families and one girl actually ended up being removed from the home) but others were just controlling to an extremely damaging degree but never crossed a line that could have landed them in hot water. The one that really stands out had a schedule like yours, and her mom also had a detailed matrix of “privileges” (with the lowest being allowed to choose her own clothes or eat dinner with the family instead of alone in her room) that had to be earned by solid weeks of no mistakes. Months would go by where she only worse the punitive uniform her mom picked out. At one point I think it may have stretched years.

The girl whose mother lost custody over it is actually doing alright, but I think a lot of that has to do with going to live with different family members when she was still youngish. Most of the people I knew who grew up like this are so used to severe consequences for every hair out of place that they just ran wild as soon as they got the opportunity because getting fired, getting arrested, none of that really scared them. That’s just the way life is as far as they’ve ever experienced. • FarFromBreton I had a friend in high school whose parents were like this. She was a straight-A student who got teased by classmates for how high-strung she was. Her mom would take her shopping and insist on buying her tons of clothes she didn’t want to wear (they were very wealthy). She once upset her parents with some minor error (I think her room got a bit messy during a very busy week), and as punishment, her parents took away all of the clothes she actually liked wearing and threatened to give them away.

When she reminded them how much those clothes cost, they settled on taking away the clothes for a month and made her wear only the clothes she usually refused to wear (which included miniskirts. Shockingly, she also had an eating disorder throughout much of high school. We lost touch after high school, but she seems to be doing okay now, luckily. • MashaKasha Wow.

My And I agree, indulgence has nothing to do with it. My parents were a bit on the helicopter side, and I know some parents in my age group that are also a bit on that side, so I’ve heard everyone’s points of view. The biggest problem with helicopter parenting as I see it, is that, as a kid/teen in this situation, you’re not allowed to make mistakes, because your parents define their own value through you. Every question you miss on a test is a judgment on them and a cause for embarrassment for them. They determine their own place in the social hierarchy, and their own value as a human being, by how well their kids do in life according to the standards defined by them. It’s pretty sick really. My parents tried pulling the same thing with my kids, but were met with resistance on all sides.

One family joke we have is about how my mom found my one son’s test scores where it said he’d placed in the 99th percentile, and asked in a saddened voice, “Why didn’t he get a hundred?”. • Jess In my first job out of college I shared an office with a man who was CONSTANTLY on the phone with his three college-aged children.

They each called him literally once an hour all day long every single workday. I remember one day his soon-to-be-graduating son was at a job fair and called him between every single booth so he could talk his kid through, “What company is next? Okay, if they ask you X, answer Y. Download Wifi For Samsung Champ C3312. If they ask you A, answer B and word it like this: blah blah blah.” The kid would hang up, talk to the recruiters, and then call his dad again to get his answers for the next interview. It blew my mind; the kid was only a year younger than I was but my parents had literally zero involvement in my job search/interview process beyond my telling them that I’d been hired somewhere and their saying, “Congratulations!

• Marillenbaum Yeah, the extent to which my mom was involved in my job search was saying, “Your uncle John works for [field related to what I wanted to do], you should probably ask him what he thinks.” Actually, it was a point of pride that I was recently able to give my mom job search advice, because I’ve been spending so much time here–she took my advice on salary, and ended up negotiating for higher pay! It was awesome, and not like I’m not already totally proud of her (she’s great), but it was so neat to be useful. • TootsNYC I think that my generation of parents, and the ones the followed me closely, got a lot of messages that said, “It is YOUR fault if your kid messes up. YOU have all the responsibility for how your kid turns you.

YOU have to make your child succeed and be happy.” I saw it–I fought against it. I remember sitting there while my kid’s teacher said to me, “He needs to learn to do this!” and I was thinking, “Then why are you scolding me?” My son didn’t format his spelling words properly (so it was easy for teacher to check rapidly), and she wrote US a note telling us that when we signed off on his homework, we were supposed to be checking that he’d done it right, so we were wrong! To be signing his homework. I’m thinking, “Why don’t you teach him the right way to do it? How am I supposed to know he’s to write double-spaced and on the left?

And why am I signing his damn homework anyway? His homework is supposed to be between him and you, and I’m only called in when he needs help.” A colleague at work said she used to have to say to her son’s teachers, “Look, this is HIS homework, not mine. Don’t talk to me. I’ll back you up, but don’t talk to ME about it.” Those are the messages we are getting, as parents. There’s a backlash, so the kids who are 4 and 8 today will get parents who are hearing the message, “let your kid take care of it; he’s more capable than you know; this is good practice.”. • Charlotte Collins I think that’s where the helicopter parenting comes from.

My parents let us make our own mistakes and be independent, but we always knew they were there when we needed them. And there were definite rules for the big, important things. However, I knew people of my generations whose parents pretty much checked out from actual, you know, parenting, and while the parents tried to “find themselves” or whatever, the kids pretty much raised themselves and their younger siblings.

For some of them, I think their reaction was to be so much the opposite of their own parents that they overdo it and become helicopter parents. (I’m not saying that this applies to everyone, just that there is a significant proportion of these generations for which this is true.) Also, I do think that there are higher expectations for parents and their kids to “succeed” than there used to be. I don’t have kids, but I realized a long time ago that I just wouldn’t have the energy to be a helicopter parent. • MashaKasha Yes, my mom was like that. Her mother was never home when she was growing up, and her father had died in the war, so my mom pretty much raised herself.

She decided that she’s be more involved in her child’s life, and boy oh boy was she. With my own kids, I remembered how I felt lost and confused in college, away from my parents, with no one to tell me what I needed to do or what decisions to make; and set myself a goal of making sure they’re able to function on their own by the time they’re out of high school. I’d say I kind of strived to be like your parents. Didn’t know my weird attempt at normal parenting would come to test during my youngest’s sophomore year of high school.

His brother was off at college and I had gotten myself into a relationship with a man who lived an hour away, insisted that I spend most weekends at his place, and insisted that I keep communication with my 16yo to a minimum while at his place, because me exchanging texts or phone calls with my kid made my then partner feel somehow unloved and unappreciated. All of a sudden the 16yo found himself at home alone most weekends with hardly any communication with me.

We got through that year in one piece somehow. No parties, no one got arrested, house did not burn down and so forth.

I guess middle-ground parenting is possible. • Pipes32 Sweeping generalizations, woo! 9 years ago, I went through our company’s college program (they hire you, train you for 6 months, and then you interview internally for your job). Last year I got to be involved in their interview process for that same college program I went to.

Let me tell you, the kids I sawhonestly, I don’t even know if I’d have gotten the job nowadays against them. I couldn’t have been more impressed with how bright and engaging even those that we didn’t bring back for the final round were! We are a high paying 6 figure job so we do get the “best of the best” candidates but man, they were awesome. • Minister of Snark We had an intern who was a cross between this poor girl and the girl who insisted that everybody should change the topic of lunch conversation to classical music to suit her.

Her parents’ constant focus on her seemed to give her the impression that she should be the center of all conversations, the most important person in any room, the person whose needs should be considered first. Hearing her tell people to change their conversation in the lunchroom because “I don’t want to hear about that” was not uncommon. (We’re not talking graphic/inappropriate topics, just TV shows and such she wasn’t allowed to watch. At 19.) “That’s not going to work for ME.” was practically her catch phrase, whether it was scheduling, an assignment where she would have to do grunt work instead of the “glory” stuff, or just being asked to do something that didn’t suit her down the ground. If her supervisors told her to do those tasks anyway, her parents would call the office to tell the supervisors why they should make an exception for her. If the supervisors reprimanded her in anyway, not even an official write-up, just a verbal, “Don’t do that again.” – her parents would call and explain to the supervisors why they should make an exception for her. If she had conflicts with coworkers, even if it was as simple as a minor dispute over who got to go to lunch first, her parents called the supervisors to explain how the situation should be resolved.

What made me really sad about the situation was that this girl really couldn’t figure out why her coworkers, even the other interns, didn’t just adore her and fall all over themselves to accommodate her. She had no coping skills and no ability to resolve conflicts with people who didn’t just give up and agree with her. If someone didn’t immediately agree with her or immediately accommodate her, she got this flummoxed “DOES NOT COMPUTE” expression on her face. And it was sad that she was not likely to develop those skills as long as her parents hovered.

• Mallory Janis Ian This reminds me of one of the girls in my sister’s circle of friends in junior high and high school. My sister would have sleepovers all the time with the same six girls. One of them was very spoiled and accustomed to getting her way all the time.

She was the first girl in her family in a long time, and her mother had been dying to have a girl. Everyone in the family colluded to make sure this girl never got anything but her own way. At sleepovers, she was always either crying that the other girls wouldn’t do what she wanted or threatening to go home if they didn’t center everything around her. Every time she would threaten to go home, my grandma would say, “Okay, time to go,” and call her mom to come get her. I don’t think she ever made it through a full night of actually sleeping over. I still wonder if she’s a spoiled adult making her coworkers miserable or if she finally matured out of it.

• Jessa Oh, yes, if I didn’t have the little diagrams, on the other hand there were times when it wasn’t clear. So what I did as a person with problem solving skills was take a blank piece of paper, mark an x on one side and put it through the machine. I then knew which way to insert the other pages. Also did this to test how the machine printed from the tray if I had to make double sided copies in the days of machines that did not do that automagically for me. You put the paper in the tray with an arrow on it and it showed you whether the blank side should be up or down, and which way to orient the papers so that both sides printed with the tops of the pages in the right direction. • jules I had to teach an older colleague how to use twitter – fair enough, not everyone is born with that knowledge.

I started to panic when she said she didn’t know what to write in the ’email’ field to create an account. And then asked me if the password for twitter had to match the exact password for her email. As the organisation was originally planning on me slowly handing over the responsibilities of digital comms to her, I had a few very very stressful weeks – until I managed to convince a higher up that it was a Very Bad Idea.

• AW I have some sympathy here because I once tutored a woman taking a computer basics course. By basics I really do mean basic stuff like creating and copying files, the simplest things for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, and doing a very simple web page at the end of the course. It was ridiculous the number of times I had to tell her that the reason she got stuck was because the book skipped a step.

The course was clearly intended for people unfamiliar with computers (IIRC, double clicking was something they covered) but the book still made assumptions about what the reader would know. • Kate Heightmeyer It really is.

My 72-year-old grandfather still has trouble grasping the difference between windows and tabs. He comes over to borrow my mom’s laptop sometimes and she reminds him to close the tab, don’t close the window, don’t press the big red “X” in the corner. And every time, without fail, he closes the window. A couple months ago, I came by a free tablet and gave it to him because he’s still lacking a computer. A few weeks later, he asked me, “Can you get these words off the screen?” The tablet came with a plastic cover with charging instructions written on it. I just stood there, pulled off the plastic, and handed it back to him. • A relative gets really frustrated with it–she kept saying she was not smart enough to learn it.

I finally called her on that–I said, “I don’t want to hear you say you’re not smart enough, because you are. You can do things I can never do.” Not wanting to was the real issue. Which is fine–if you don’t want to do any more than you absolutely have to, okay then. But don’t tell me you CAN’T learn it, because I know for a fact that you can. My 78-year-old dad could, and every so often he expresses interest in getting a computer, but then he just doesn’t bother. He’d be fun to teach, though.:).

• A Teacher My dad had to call me to explain how to turn off the old PC before my mom just went to a laptop. Of course, this is the same man that just got my old iPhone 4 and his cell phone before that was 7 years old. On his old phone you would hit 1 and it would take you to voicemail and then in the voicemail box you could hit 7 to delete the voicemail. Only problem, He was just dialing 7 (skipping the 1 part) and couldn’t figure out why his voicemail box was full and why he kept speed dialing someone. Well, his phone was my sister’s old phone and the 7 he was speed dialing was her part time employer–an ambulance company that she is a paramedic for. He said “that explains why they ask me if this is an emergency of non-emergency when I dial that number.”. • Beth When I send a spreadsheet by email to a new client for the first time I do not assume they know to click on the tabs, I made that mistake once and got an angry email from a client saying I owed him $150o instead of the $350 he owed me.

Now I just take the time to mention in the email, “if you click on the tab labeled November you can see that the months expenditures were this much. If you click on the tab labeled November chart you can see where your money is going in an easy to understand format. ” I still get emails back, “what do you mean tabs?”. • Liz in a Library Never had interns, but had student workers.

Many of them were wonderful, but those unfamiliar with a work environment sometimes made odd decisions. We had one student worker who was so flighty. She was delightful as a person, but just could not seem to stay on track with a job. She did well in her classes, so I’m not sure what the issue was, but she’d justnot show up when scheduled. Or show up when not scheduled, show up at odd times, etc. The final straw was the day that she called 45 minutes after the start of her shift to say she ran out of gas in another state (4 hours away) and wouldn’t be in.

• Lisa I had a student worker who was like this as well. My director was desperate to get someone hired before the school year started and took on this student that I never would have personally hired. She never responded to e-mails, was constantly late, and always wore a t-shirt and sweats/jeans to work in our office. She only worked on our business professional program’s class days, and one week she just didn’t show up.

She told the (irate) director that she had gotten an e-mail from me saying that she wasn’t supposed to come in until noon that day so I came into a VERY angry e-mail from the director asking what was going on. The e-mail I sent was for a date two weeks in the future with the date clearly labeled in the subject line and twice in the body of the e-mail. Since the girl hadn’t responded, I assumed she’d understood.

I left the job for a big move, and I heard through the grapevine that, after a year of employment, the girl skipped two days in a row because she was sick but didn’t bother to notify anyone she wouldn’t be coming in. She finally got fired for that stunt! • Ash (the other one) I should add, all of my interns thus far (I’ve had around 6 now that I’ve supervised in one form or another) have been great and who I take pride in knowing they’re off doing great things now. It’s only watching other interns from afar that I have to shake my head.

Like the one intern who, when I was at a federal government department, was so convinced she was going to not only get a full time job, but that that job would be working with the Secretary of the department. Yea, that’s not how federal jobs (or political appointments) work! She went around bragging to everyone she could find that this was going to happen, only for her to go home like everyone else at the end of the summer.

• mskyle I see what you’re saying, but for a lot of college students the first thing they need to learn is how to learn if you hold their hands at the beginning it’s more successful for everyone. You could say that students who don’t know these things aren’t ready for college yet, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with you, but it’s not like they have a lot of other places to go to learn these skills, and a lot of colleges can’t afford to be super picky about only accepting students who are super ready to be there.

Ultimately you need to meet people where they are, and a lot of college students (young ones especially, but many of the older students as well) benefit from structure, tiered deadlines, etc. And that’s why I don’t work in higher ed anymore! • AcademiaNut Exactly – for public universities in the US, I think about 25% of funding comes from tuition, on average. So you can argue that because students are using public resources, they should be morally obliged to show up and work.

The other factor is that universities are increasingly expected to be accountable for the performance of their students, like is the case for pre-secondary education. I suspect that university oversight of student attendance, etc., will increase drastically if this becomes the case, and universities will be much more ready to fire students who have poor attendance, or who refuse to comply with mandatory remedial measures if they’re doing poorly. • Charlotte Collins Also, if it’s a state university, my taxes go to help support the school.

I’d rather the students were going to class than not if I’m going to fund them. The only college-level classes I’ve ever known of with attendance policies were the smaller, more intensive courses where you really can’t just learn the material on your own, unless you also are pestering someone who does show up in class for their notes.

(As I used to be the pesteree, this is really not fair to the other students.). • Anx Genuinely curious why do you care if the student atttends the course or not, so long as they are participating in the coursework? Even if you are paying as a taxpayer, they are likely paying quite a bit more as the consumer. If they would prefer to stay home and study out of the book instead of sitting in class waiting to go home to study the material, what does it matter? I say this as someone who is a mostly read-the-book learner and prefers having access to an instructor to clarify points rather than lecture. • alter_ego nah, at least at my school, I only took one class for my undergraduate degree that even took attendance.

That class did have a three strikes policy, which was annoying, both because it was a class unrelated to my major that I was taking as a fun elective, and because the professor would regularly cancel class, and only inform us by putting a sign on the door of the classroom. The fact that the only professor I had in 5 years who took attendance was also the only one who regularly cancelled class, without even advanced notification still pisses me off.

• Cactus My grad program didn’t have those rules, but if someone was routinely missing classes with no explanation, there would have beenconcern, to say the least. In undergrad, some professors had these rules, others didn’t. I was fine with the “miss X number of classes and your grade drops/you flunk barring extenuating circumstances” rules.

What irritated me the most were when professors said stuff like “you are expected to show up for every class!” Because of course, duh we were. And of course I’d try my hardest to do so. But shit happens, and if you’re teaching an intro-level survey course for the core curriculum, it might not be the highest thing on everyone’s agenda. • Kiryn My favorite one of these was a Logic class I took in my first semester of college. The professor taught directly from the book, and gave us the test schedule on the first day of class.

It was 3 days a week at 7:30 in the morning on the opposite side of campus from my dorm room in a climate where it rained 9 months of the year. I trudged half-asleep through the rain for half the semester (I’m stubborn about these things) before I gave up and stopped going to class except on test days. Still got an A. I have to wonder how empty the classroom was towards the end. • Kate Heightmeyer Oh, no. I just graduated this past May and over my four years I only missed class if I was sick (with one exception).

I found it endlessly fascinating the number of students who would suddenly appear on exam days. Most of my professors didn’t have attendance policies. No one had automatic failing policies. The few that had attendance policies at all allowed two or three absences before grades started dropping (with exceptions for emergencies).

One professor, on the first day of class, announced that he was being forced to teach the class on-campus (it was previously only offered online). Our grades consisted entirely of tests which were conducted online over material that was exclusively in the book.

He told us directly, “If you don’t want to show up for class, you don’t have to.” I went for the first couple of weeks, listened to him ramble aimlessly about topics mostly unrelated to what we were studying, and decided that I would be better off spending those four hours a week doing something actually useful. I aced the class. • Anyonymous Yeah, I definitely had an instructor in college who told us that if we missed ONE CLASS, we would fail, unless the reason we were missing the class was because we were in a coma or dead.

Someone asked hypothetically if they could miss for a family member’s funeral and he said no, that would result in failing the class. On September 11, 2001, every other professor/instructor whose class I went to that day let us go home almost immediately, after talking about our feelings for a few minutes. This guy proceeded with class like usual. When he noticed that we were all looking bewildered, he said, “What? They’re not going to fly a plane into us.” A week later he told us he had just gone to New Orleans for the weekend and that if we ever wanted to fly anywhere, we should do it then because “flights will never be cheaper!”. • Artemesia I’m guessing he had had a lot of students who were losing their 16th grandparents each finals week. I had a colleague once who sent a letter of condolence to parents of a student who missed a critical presentation for his team because of the death of a grandparents; led to an interesting set of interactions.

It is a lovely jujitsu because if the student is not lying then it is a nice thing to have done and if he was lying then at the least his parents know what a great job they did raising this one. • Cleopatra Jones I had a college professor who refused to allow students to make up exams. So I had to drag my 6 year old to class a few days after she had a tonsillectomy because the instructor refused to let me make up the exam or take it earlier (didn’t have a baby sitter) Even though, I told her at the beginning of class that my child would be getting a tonsillectomy, so we could make arrangements. After the class was over, I filed a complaint against her to the department chair and flamed her on the course evaluations. My evaluation coupled with multiple other complaints led to her dismissal from the university. • Cleopatra Jones ahh, if only it was that simple 1) I was single parent who had set up her work/school schedule so that I was available for my child and did not have to constantly rely on a baby sitter or daycare (cause that stuff costs money that I did not have).

2) I told the instructor as soon as I found out that she needed to have the surgery so we could make arrangements in the class. I offered to take the exam the week before so that I would not miss any work in the class. It wasn’t like I had 16 weeks, it was more like during week 2 of the class I found out she needed surgery & it would have taken place in week 4 or 5 on a test day. I knew she didn’t allow make ups on exams hence the ‘please let me take it earlier’. 3) I had a signed doctor’s statement regarding the surgery & recovery week. It wasn’t that I was making up excuses to get out of class.

4) Even if I knew about it before the class started why is it unreasonable to make arrangements with the instructor so I didn’t inconvenience her or miss class work? I provided all of the documentation that you would present at any job. I wasn’t expecting her to handle my life or feel sorry for me, just be a reasonable accommodating human being because ya knowshit happens that is sometimes beyond our control. • Ad Astra Yikes. I think these days most universities have campus-wide policies that allow you to miss classes, including tests, as long as you have some kind of documentation that you were sick or attending a funeral or got into a car accident on your way to class or something. They relaxed the doctor’s note thing when Swine Flu hit, and have encouraged teachers to be a little more lenient about illnesses since then, because too many students were coming to class when they were contagious — and dragging themselves into the campus health center for notes when they’d be better off staying in bed.

• Phoenix My college campus had a pretty bad swine flu epidemic while I was there. Professors were instructed to drop any and all attendance requirements for class, make class materials available online wherever possible, and make special arrangements for immunocompromised students to take classes digitally wherever possible, even if they were on campus. The dining halls also set up a program where you could bring a friend’s student ID to swipe for their meal plan and carry away a huge container of food for them, so that they didn’t need to come to the dining halls themselves if they were sick.

• Shelly My mom had a Professor like that. She went back to college to earn a nursing degree when she was in her late 40’s so she was a “non-traditional” student.

She had good grades in all of her classes and rarely ever missed a class. But she had a heart attack towards the end of one of her semesters–thankfully it was minor and she only missed a week of classes.

Well the one professor wanted to fail her even though she had documentation that she was truly in the hospital. She took it over the professor’s head and took the matter to dean who promptly told the professor that if she failed my mom she (the professor) would be out of a job. • Moksha Maginifique Ergh, papers. I was the TA for a 1st year World Lit seminar for two years running. Two 3-5 page response papers, due in my pigeonhole by 5:00 P.M.

Tkinter Tutorial Python Pdf To Xml there. EST on Tuesdays and Thursdays. No exceptions.

You might get lucky–I might be running late from a meeting–but once I cleared out the box and had the papers in my hand, any other incoming papers were late. End of Story. Even if you run up to me while I am exiting the mail room papers in hand. If there was a valid reason why your paper might be late, email the professor. I will not accept it.

And these first year jerks were always complaining to the professor and the Humanities Chair about how I was mean because they were “only, like, five minutes late!” None of them seemed to realize or care about the fact that for minimum wage I was spending my Tuesday and Thursday nights going through a stack of 80+ 3 to 5 page papers, highlighting key sections, and annotating them for the professor. Add in my own homework, and I normally did not wrap up until about 9:00 a.m. The following day–just in time to shower and make it to my 9:30 Critical Theory seminar. • LQ The worst was really my own fault. It was my first intern. My boss had left so I was handling things basically alone. Intern was going to take the lead on planning an event I’d done 3 years in a row, most of the people were already lined up, it was–for me– just a matter of finalizing things, doing a theme and publicity.

She wanted to be an event planner and said she’d done things way bigger than this. Great here’s the package, run with it. Let me know if you have problems or questions. (WORST IDEA EVER.) I assumed everything was fine. (EVEN WORSE IDEA.) I basically didn’t hear from her until the Friday before the event when she said, um, I don’t know how to do this. I had to personally cancel the event, lost the money, lost the grant for the next year.

She said, yeah I guess I’m not really a self starter. I learned to not wait for people to come to me with problems.

We both apologize and went our separate ways. (I don’t think she was deliberately bad at all. I think she might have been fine if I’d been much more hands on.). • Beancounter in Texas We had a temporary employee as a receptionist who impressed the heck out of our boss with her professional dress (which is all he appears to believe it takes to be professional). Then, after she was gone, I discovered the stacks of payables filed together. We manage over 30 companies in our office, so we paperclip or bind payables of the same company together for filing. She took the whole stack, looked at the vendor on the first check and filed the entire stack in that vendor’s file.

It was something I assumed would be obvious, but apparently, some people need more guidance and don’t know when to ask questions. • other rick The interns from my alma mater are generally good, if a little unfocused in their career planning.

(It’s the entertainment industry–everyone starts out wanting to be a little bit of everything.) One intern from my alma mater was just the worst. Completely unprofessional. Bragging about his personal life and sexual conquests. Would listen to constructive criticism, make all the right noises, and then continue his behavior unchanged. We asked him to do a technical evaluation on an episode of broadcast television–picture quality, sound quality, etc. He came back with notes about the story structure, plot holes, and poor acting.

One day near the end of the internship, we had him sit with and learn from the most chill, easygoing freelancer in the department–because hardly anyone else would work with intern at this point. In the middle of the day, said freelancer turned to garbage intern and asked, “Hey man, are you hungry?” Intern thought for a moment and smarmily replied, “Yeah, you know what? I am!” Our freelancer then told him exactly what he could eat. Intern did nothing but make-work errands after that.

Freelancer took his chewing out gracefully and continued to work for us for a few more years. Intern left the industry six months after being unable to find work to suit him.

• I had a major screwup I am a very level headed person but had an alcohol fueled adventure in front of some very important people one night. I was a political intern and there is an annual “convention” that in all honesty is just a a big drunken booze fest, and I did partake. My biggest embarrassments of the night were falling over drunk on the GOVERNOR (his security detail had to step in because I was so tipsy) and being kicked out of a hospitality suite for reasons I don’t remember but all I recall are the words “we don’t use that language around the Congressman.” Thankfully this is one of the few events where this type of behavior isn’t a career killer, I went on to a fruitful political career after that, but boy was I ashamed for a while. • bridget I am aware of at least THREE separate individuals who did almost the exact same thing as clerks for either law firms or judges. In at least one case, the um, unauthorized use of the computer systems was not discovered for several months, and only when it became apparent that the clerk had been doing literally zero work the entire time. In 2/3 of the cases it resulted in firing, but in one it was similar to yours; supervisor just kept a closer eye on his browser history and hoped it didn’t come up again. • bridget In my city, the younger attorneys call law students “summer associates” and the older attorneys call them “clerks.” It can be a little confusing, because “clerk” is used for judicial clerkships as well (which is a full-time position, either in one or two year terms, with a few “career clerks” who stay longer).

Lawsuited, I have never heard of a “career clerk” at a private firm, only for a judge. That might be specific to your region. What you describe as a “clerk” sounds like what I would call a paralegal. • Hermione My favorite example of this is from my boyfriend, who at the time worked at a (niche) chemical company doing customer service over the phone. They hired a man who was classified as legally blind, but who with his glasses could see the computer screen when zoomed in 300x enough to do the job. He had a host of other problems with getting the work done properly and without complaint, but it wasn’t until he was there six weeks when his manager came into his cubicle to one large, pierced and very, very, pixelated breast on the screen that he was let go. • Sara The Event Planner We had an intern that I swear was a robot.

He did good work and was polite – he was just the most socially awkward person I’ve ever encountered. I actually felt quite bad for him. If you said “good morning, Andrew,” he would stare directly into your eyes for a full 5-10 seconds before muttering a hello, then immediately turn and book it away from you. If he had a question or needed something, he wouldn’t knock or say hi or anything.

He would just stand silently in the doorway of your office, slowly inching his way closer, until you noticed him. I almost fell out of my chair on multiple occasions when I suddenly saw him standing there – he scared the crap out of me!

He also almost never talked. 75% of his communication was done through nodding and shrugging. Weirdly, I ran into him at the grocery store a few months later, and he was perfectly friendly and chatty. I wonder if maybe he had just been nervous about being in a professional setting for the first time? It was very bizarre. • majigail We had one last semester who on his first day brought in pictures of him and his dog and him with his sister at prom AND a Walking Dead piggy bank with Rick (the main character) holding a bloody gun.

He was heartbroken when I told him that statues holding bloody or any guns didn’t belong in any workplace and it had to go home. Same intern was a recent grad in English but couldn’t write to save his life. His idea of writing a press release was copying other documents and pasting them together differently. I spent more time fixing his mistakes than it would have taken me to do it myself. • amaranth16 I don’t think this is a fair statement. Lots of companies and organizations want people to use consistent boilerplate in different materials. In any of the jobs I’ve had, if I were putting together a press release or other standardized piece of collateral, it had damn well better match the language that’s already on our website/other collateral.

Sourcing from the company’s existing content is, in a lot of situations, standard practice. Academic writing is profoundly different from marketing writing and it’s not fair to expect a student to know how to write a press release just because they wrote a thesis on Chaucer.

• Charlotte Collins In some programs, technical writing and business writing are taught as separate classes (as they should be – but sometimes they are lumped together). However, there are a lot of different writing classes an English major can take, so you can graduate with a degree in English without taking either. For a lot of people, technical writing is considered the most difficult type to learn and to teach, because it is very different from most other writing.

I was once told that (good) poets make the best technical writers, because they understand how to illustrate complex ideas in the fewest words possible. • Ad Astra I took a tech writing course through my university’s English department, but most of the students were STEM majors and we never talked about press releases or any kind of business writing. That’s more the purview of strategic communications, which at my university was located in the journalism school. Every English major I’ve known has had to drastically change his/her writing style to work in communications, journalism, PR, etc. Strong writers are quite capable of adjusting, of course, but they didn’t learn these formats in college. • Shore Leave Would be weird to bring it the first day but I actually have a Walking Dead poster and a Rocket Raccoon action figure holding a gun in my office. And one of my co-workers is big into horror and has a lot of horror pictures and posters in her office as well.

Nothing graphic but I don’t think it’s a big deal. No one was even bothered that for our winter holiday door decorating contest, I did a Nightmare Before Chrismas theme with little skeletons wearing Santa hats and a killer wreath eating an elf. • AnotherAlison Right, yeah, I see the difference between fake blood and real blood, too. You probably wouldn’t really ever see these pics in my office, because I always have files open on my screen, and I do clean up and de-personalize my desktop anytime I’m using my laptop for a presentation. They’re probably not really blatantly offensive photos, other than to people who are just personally opposed to hunting on principal, no blood or anything gratuitous, but I’m okay with people who are opposed to hunting on principal and if someone asked me to not have this up, I’d take it down.

(Considering some of the client trips we do are hunting trips, I’m pretty sure I’m not violating any policies or anything like that.). • cupcakes.but not for everyone At Old Job, we often had interns roaming around. They weren’t paid, but we did give them other perks, like free parking in our downtown office (which the employees didn’t even get).

Plus, it was part-time work (15-20 hours a week). We had one intern (“Melanie”) who was scheduled to be in the office 2.5 days a week. The internship was 12 weeks long. Her first week, she called in sick. From that point on, she called in sick every single day for about two weeks.

She finally came into the office and the Internship Coordinator had a conversation with her (basically making sure everything was okay, there weren’t any problems, that she was still able to participate in the internship program, etc.). Melanie reiterated her interest in the program and promised she wouldn’t miss anymore. The next week rolls around and – you guessed it – Melanie called in sick again.

The Internship Coordinator called Melanie the next day and let her know that this was her final warning and if she missed again, she would be let go. Melanie called in sick again the next day, but came in the following day. As soon as she arrived at the office, the Internship Coodinator asked to speak with her privately. The IC let her go and explained why.

Melanie burst into tears and started babbling about how “she needed the internship for class credit,” and “she goes out every night of the week and that’s why she’s been calling in ‘sick’.” She even went as far as asking the IC to be a reference for her for jobs she had been applying for! (Melanie was a recent graduate.). • Splishy Not an intern, but my first college roommate was like this. She was underage for drinking at the time (US drinking age is 21, she was 19 if I remember correctly) and her biggest bragging point was that she made a fake ID. Anyways, her drinking had drastically increased after spring break that year until finals week where she was passed out drunk and missed one of her core studies finals. She calls the professor with a story that she just felt unprepared for the final and begged to take it at one of the other scheduled times. The professor agrees to allow her to take it later in the week.

(I was in the room and heard her half of the conversation, including her confirming the date and time.) What does roomie do? Apparently she took Arlo Guthrie’s advice in “Alice’s Restaurant” and got good and drunk the night before the re-scheduled final and *slept through it again*. I moved to a different dorm the next year. Last I heard she was on academic probation. • Minister of Snark I’ve seen the opposite and it doesn’t make sense either. When I was interning at a small publication, one of my fellow interns went out and got absolutely off-her-face hammered drunk the night before she was supposed to work the morning shift. Rather than calling in “sick,” she just stayed up all night and went to work in her smokey, sweaty club clothes and messy hair and smeared make-up.

The internship coordinator came in and found her sleeping, and asked her what the hell she was thinking, coming to work smelling like a brewery and sleeping at her desk, intern got defensive and pissy and insisted that showing up in this state was the mark of being a “pro.” She was super-shocked when an offer for long-term employment was not forthcoming. • Anie Just had an intern issue this summer. Our paid marketing intern was told our hours were “flexible.” This clearly was not explained well-enough, though I really feel we’d given examples. We meant that if you had a six hour shift and showed up at 8:15 instead of 8, it wasn’t a big deal to stay until 2:15 in order to work your full shift. He was only supposed to work 3 days a week. His first week, he showed up Monday and asked to work Tuesday instead of Wednesday.

Tuesday, he asked to leave early Friday, but then ended up showing up Thursday, without approval, instead. His second week was much of the same jumping around. And then he gave two week’s notice because “he had to go back to school.” Riiiight. Well, we had two whole months of summer left empty. • OfficePrincess I was also solidly mediocre. I never did anything wrong, I just never had anything real to do. I was the org’s first intern.

The person who agreed to take me on ended up relocating before I started (accepted in the spring to start in the fall) and no one else knew what to do with me. It was an org that does case management, but I rotated through everyone, so every week or two I was meeting new clients. I didn’t get to know any of the cases all that well, so I couldn’t contribute anything or even watch any of them progress.

• GS I was the intern manager (among other hats) at a professional services firm that was just in the process of opening a remote office in Washington, D.C. At the time, two consultants were working out of that office, but there was no management or administrative staff. So, I was tasked with hiring an intern through our home office’s program to be based in the DC office. We hired a young woman who had pretty significant professional experience prior to this, with fantastic references, and she was to be remotely managed by me as she served as basically a de facto office manager. Fast forward a few months, our consultants were fairly displeased with her work product (though refused to give any real actionable feedback), and insisted she was simply the wrong fit. I finally cornered one of them on a visit to the office and they informed me that they suspected she was using the office as her personal after-hours party spot, but had no proof.

We pulled the keycard records and showed she entered the building after 8 PM most days of the week, and spent much of the day there on Saturdays as well. Our building was in a high crime area, so it also had cameras.

We pulled the (horrific) video. She clearly wasn’t aware of the cameras.

Not only was she having drinking parties most nights, she was using the office as her personal sex room(s), with multiple partners, to very graphic detail. Perhaps most horrific: when compiling enough documentation to begin the termination process, we asked the building to provide us with a copy of one of the tamer but still unacceptable videos. It was delivered by the building engineer, who admitted (he thought, humorously) to have slept with the intern himself, and he and his buddies had enjoyed attending her sex and alcohol parties.

Quite possibly the most uncomfortable termination conversation ever (as we didn’t have a female manager in her group at the time) and I also had to notify her school (because this was a very formal internship program in partnership with them, and terminating her early required an explanation). • GS They were obviously horrified. No idea what they did to her, we explicitly did not want to be involved after the termination meeting where we discussed why she was being let go, what was standard professional behavior, and why she was so wildly off-point.

They dragged me and our CEO into a meeting with some senior official to impress upon us how nothing like this has ever happened before in the double-digit number of years they’ve had this program. I did my best to assure them that we didn’t take it as a reflection on the school, because we’ve had dozens of fantastic people from this program (before and after). After they tried to setup another meeting I reminded them that I was an alum too, and kindly asked that we not be involved in anything related to this woman ever again. It’s been almost 6 years now, though. • AnotherAlison My comment was based on the presumption by GS that she was trying to fit in and make friends, which is a little different from your presumption that this was just her standard way to pass an evening and have a good time.

I may not know much about the term. It’s not one that comes up in my day to day life, and honestly, if it’s a commonly offensive phrase, I was not aware. I was trying to use something that was G-rated language to describe the behavior. Sorry you dislike it. I do feel you’re over-reacting a bit because I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt that their intentions are innocent, rather than every comment on the Internet is “shaming”, but that’s your right to feel that way, too. • GS We treated the entire thing as the end of an internship term. This was a young woman, so we wanted to address it as a learning experience and not just fire her and escort her out.

So, we started out with an evaluation of her work product. Then we played a video for her (it was one without sex) so she knew we had video. We discussed how entirely unacceptable her behavior was, we offered to put her in touch with our employee wellness program if she needed to talk to someone (we debated this one, but felt she was putting herself in such danger that it was worth it), explained that she’d be dealing with the university next, paperwork, final paycheck logistics, watched her pack up her desk, etc. • Regular Reader We had an intern who wrote a blog post for our institution and shared it on her blog, unbeknownst to us. However, we saw the link had been shared, followed it to her blog, realized it was our intern, and saw posts criticizing our workplace, staff members, and clients. We talked to her about this being extremely unprofessional and damaging.

Soon after her school pulled her from the internship anyway because she was on the verge of failing her classes. It’s one of the most bizarre intern experiences we’ve ever had.