One summer during college, I interned at a very small corporate travel agency. It was a one-woman operation, and the owner (who was just trying to get her business off the ground) had hired two (female) college interns to man the desks during the hours when she was not in the “office.” “Office” is in quotation marks because the space consisted of one tiny, windowless room with two ancient computers and a telephone, located in the basement of a restaurant/lounge whose owner my boss “knew.” “Knew” in quotation marks because it wasn’t altogether clear how rent was being paid, other than a strong suggestion that it did not involve cash and probably involved some hanky-panky.

I didn’t meet the landlord until a few weeks into the summer. He was a tall, strikingly handsome man with a wedding ring who showed me pictures of his gorgeous wife and two adorable daughters. He came by a few times looking for my boss, but she usually wasn’t there when I was. On his third or fourth visit to our little basement room, he started cordially asking questions about my life:

“Where did you go to high school?”

“Where are you in college?”

“When did you lose your virginity?”

Wait, what?

Being a naïve 19-year old, I blushingly turned back to my computer without answering this last question, mumbling that I should get back to work and thinking he would just go away. He did not go away. Instead he started massaging my shoulders, and invited me to help him cheat on his wife. In the years since, I’ve blocked most of his romantic monologue out of my memory, but I will never forget one key phrase: “Once you go Black, you never go back.” Yes, this man actually spoke these words to me out loud. From then on, I switched all my shifts and locked the door from the inside while I was working (in retrospect this was a flimsy defense strategy considering the man owned the place).

I met the other intern at the end of the summer, and we compared notes, piecing together what had been an odd few months for both of us. First of all, the intern, myself, and our boss all looked very, very similar. The guy obviously had a “type” (interestingly, his wife was not this type). He also apparently confused the other intern for me when he met her and tried to pick up where he’d left off (square 1). Secondly, it appears our restauranteur was not very creative with his pickup lines–the going Black and never going back phrase was also used on my intern colleague. Third, our boss had recently gotten serious with her boyfriend and coincidentally, the “lease” on the “office” was running out and the company was going to have to relocate.

Luckily no innocent college interns were seriously harmed in this unhealthy work environment, but man did I learn something about how the professional world operates–and isn’t that was summer internships are all about?

MVWJ was actually an unpaid internship my senior year in college. Due to a misunderstanding between my academic adviser and me, I had to take 21 credits the last semester of my senior year to graduate. One of those three credit courses was an internship through a local communications company owned by a mega-church, where I was to go in for 10 hours a week (about two hours a day after class five times a week).

Initially, I thought this sounded like a great gig–they owned three magazines, three radio stations and had several websites for things like music and Christian news and I would get to interview bands and hang out at concerts. Big mistake.

My first day, I was told to get the receptionist coffee and to deliver packages to a FedEx office. Not long after, the senior pastor of the church that owned the communications company was going to visit and I was literally given a roll of tape and told to wrap the tape around my hand–sticky side out–and to get down on my hands and knees and use the sticky side of the tape to get lint out of the royal purple carpet.

One of my supervisors was fine, but the other was a pompous bimbo who did nothing but steal articles off other internet websites, slap her name on them and turn them in for publication. How this escaped notice of legit organizations is beyond me. After less than two weeks, I had exhausted all of the writing they had available for me. I was then given tasks such as organizing photos and the supply cabinet and stuffing binders for the church’s next big sermon series. At this point, I was about eight weeks away from a degree in journalism and I felt like all of this was ridiculous.

The best part of the internship came at the end of the semester, when I sat down with my faculty adviser (who was also a professor in three other classes I had taken). The adviser told me my internship supervisor, the pompous bimbo, had written a horrible letter to him complaining about my work ethic, how I never showed up on time and how I brought a bad attitude into the office. She also said I never completed my hours of internship and refused sign off on my class credit.

My professor listened to my side of the story and signed off on my internship hours. Eight years later, I’m an award-winning newspaper reporter and the pompous bimbo never made a career in legitimate journalism. The magazines and websites are also now defunct.

After college, I was interested in copyediting and layout, so I answered a Craigslist posting for a gig doing just that. It turns out that the guy was self-publishing (ha!) these two books he wrote, one about his travels fucking his way through Europe, the other about his time in jail for crack-related offenses. It was unpaid for now, but he promised monetary compensation once his other projects started bringing in cash. I was naive, had some money to live off of for a few months, and thought it was going to be OK.

The guy was clearly an ex-junkie, if it wasn’t obvious enough from his (not actually bad) book. He had a zillion ideas for making money, most of which sounded vaguely promising to a green kid. He was contacting other authors whose books were out of print, wanting to handle the reprinting of their books. He had designs for an eco-friendly business and entertainment directory in our city. It all seemed on the up and up, and I wanted to get behind the eco-friendly thing.

I would meet with him a few times a week to go over the revisions I suggested, and we’d discuss the book. When discussing the “fucking his way through Europe” book, he asked me about my sexual orientation. I told him I was a lesbian. He pressed for further confirmation, as if it was any of his business as a boss significantly older than his intern, to know. Weeks went on, his crazy stayed at a minimal level–he would try to give me clothes he found at Goodwill that didn’t fit me at all, he told me increasingly bizarre stories about his ex-wife etc. I just got more and more uncomfortable around him.

Eventually, after being privy to a long ridiculous tale about how his ex-wife destroyed his life, I stopped returning his emails. So he called me. I have blocked out most of the conversation, but in it, he told me that he never believed me when I said I was gay, that he was just trying to feel me out because he wanted to fuck me. He told me that I shouldn’t be surprised because all the girls in the “fucking around Europe” book were significantly younger than he. I told him that I was going to hang up the phone, after refusing to “start the conversation over”and did so. He called me back several times in the next half hour, and I silenced my phone every time. He tried me a few more times over the next few months, but I recognized his number. And then, eight months later, I answered an unknown number…which turned out to be him.

Now I’ve completely changed careers and am much happier. But still, there is a reason I don’t answer unknown numbers any more. Both numbers I have connected with him are under “DO NOT ANSWER” on my phone book. Since he was a freelance crazy, there was no HR to report him to. The whole experience is still a little hard to describe. On the bright side, even working with middle schoolers can’t be as bad as working for him.