Infernal interns
Interns are great. But watch out for catastrophesWhat about those interns, eh? Mischievous scamps, but you love them anyway. Well, you love the fact you never have to make your own tea and coffee. Same difference.
You don’t have to pay them, be nice to them, pay attention to them — and still they come into work the next day. But before you start thinking about replacing every employee with an intern, there’s one thing you should know:
Interns can, and will, destroy anything and everything you hold dear. Like toddlers left unattended, they will risk life and limb in a matter of moments, giggling and gurgling the whole time while doing it.
Here are just some of the more common ways interns will cause the world to come crashing down around your ears, taken from a confessions thread on Quora.
E-mail shenanigans
Our advice is: never send an e-mail to an intern. CC’ing in your interns is like shipping your nukes through North Korea. Did you really think they’d get through safely to the other side? Great, and now you have a nuclear apocalypse on your hands.
CEO sends two e-mails to an intern. The first is a personal e-mail for a supervisory board, bitching out an entire division, and musing on when he was planning to fire all of them. The other was a standard issue Christmas e-mail, wishing his employees a happy New Year. He asked the intern to forward the e-mail. Caught in the age-old dilemma of a donkey trapped between two equally tempting piles of hay, and too afraid to ask for clarification, decided to gamble on sending the first e-mail to the entire staff. Close, but no cigar.
An intern at Siemens was trying to organise a friendly 5-a-side match in the office, and sends out an open offer to everybody in the office…and the entire Siemens mailing list. Half a million people suddenly found themselves with an offer for a friendly kickabout. The fate of the intern is left suspiciously unsaid.
Ruining something expensive
Two interns at Heathrow were observing Air Traffic controllers and timing how long it took for pilots to respond to Air Traffic instructions. At lunch, one of them accidentally left their radio on transmit and then walked off. Because radio transmission is one-way, it meant that pilots and Air Traffic controllers couldn’t talk to one another. The other intern then sat down to tuck into their own lunch at their desk. While thoughtfully chowing down, they had no idea that the entire airport had come to a standstill, with every pilot and Air Traffic controller forced to listen to the sound of the intern eating their lunch for 10 minutes.
A company was close to sealing the deal for a corporate partnership with UPS. The sales team had spent weeks perfecting their final proposal, after talks had been going on for almost a year. It was crunch time, and when it was all ready, the intern was dispatched to deliver the proposal to UPS. Which they did. By FedEx. The company lost the partnership two days later.
Two thrill-seeking interns at NASA decided that pushing the boundaries of space exploration just wasn’t exciting enough for them. They managed to fool security systems and proceeded to steal millions of dollars worth of moon rocks. After arranging to sell some of the moon rocks to a Belgian geologist, the interns then decided to have sex on top of them. You know, because having a giant pile of moon rocks isn’t something you have every day. You’re never going to get another chance, you know? They were quickly caught in an FBI sting operation. But although they were able to take away their freedom, they couldn’t take away their title as “Only people to ever have sex on top of moon rocks.”
It is estimated by the prosecution that their actions cost NASA $30 million dollars.
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