How To Leave A Lasting Impression (And Some Of Your Tooth) At Your First New York Internship
It was hard to narrow down my 26-year span of embarrassing incidents to just one gem for this month’s theme. I could fill decades of YM magazine’s “Say Anything” column with what I believed was a permanent streak of bad luck during my younger years. But then I recalled one I had buried deep in the back of my mind.
Pan in on an eager, 20-year-old me arriving on the last day of my first New York internship that I paid to go to (since I worked for free and it didn’t cover my travel expenses from the suburbs of New Jersey). I’m pretty sure Bruce Springsteen has a song or two about these particular woes of a broke college student home for the summer and trying to woo real-life adults of the working world.
There wasn’t much for me to do at that summer internship, but I wanted to leave on a high note. In the span of a day, I was determined to establish my legacy as “token female intern who absolutely killed it” (at life, Twitter in 2009, etc.) in a small office of about six or seven men — which included the resident “hot guy in the office” I had a crush on. And I would try to do so on my only errand run on my last day working there.
First, I had to pick up an item from the building I dreamed of working in (along with every other Liz Lemon wannabe): 30 Rockefeller Plaza. A task (that should have been) so easy that I’d still have time to establish a lifelong friendship with Lorne Michaels and/or Brian Williams while there. Except my cell phone decided to pick and choose which calls I received that day, regardless of having service or not. Not entirely convenient for the NBC employee I was retrieving the item from, who waited so long that he had called my boss wondering where I was.
Cut to me sweating profusely, thinking I’ve already disappointed my boss but also wondering, “Did I put deodorant on today? Today, the hottest day of the year, maybe, and the one day I had to run around frantically for work?” No clue, but this could easily be resolved by purchasing a travel-size deodorant at a convenience store in the basement of 30 Rock, which I bet glamorous women like Meredith Vieira have to do all the time here.
However, my struggle to remove the plastic, protective cap on the deodorant with my sweaty hands was enough to get me nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series or Unpaid Internship. This was going to involve some aggressive, animalistic behavior in the form of me using my teeth to pull it off. And off pops the cap — along with more than half of my front tooth that I’d just gotten fixed from being chipped.
With most of my dignity and front tooth missing and leaving a gaping hole in its place, I trudged on to the next errand at Tekserve to make a Very Important Purchase on behalf of my boss. A task that would elicit many detailed questions pertaining to whatever type of tech product I was buying, resulting in me calling my boss multiple times, my calls apparently not going through, then him calling me multiple times and none of his calls going through. It was as if someone took only the frustrating, miscommunication storylines from “Three’s Company” (so like, full-length episodes) and then applied it to this situation where my boss thought I was screening his calls.
I returned to the office hours later and still had to say my goodbyes to the all-male office while attempting to keep my mouth as closed as possible and not reveal my half-missing tooth. All of this was dragged out by the fact that my dad had come upstairs to make small talk and drop off boxes of bread from the company he works for, which I had weirdly asked him to do as a going-away-and-please-don’t-hate-me present. Because nothing says, “Keep me in mind for future jobs in the media and entertainment industry!” like flavored wraps and pita bread.
It’s one thing if my co-workers thought I couldn’t complete a couple of errands on my last day, but if they also discovered that I somehow managed to lose almost all of my front tooth in the process, I’d never be able to show my face again in that office of a small digital marketing agency inside a sort-of apartment building in SoHo. Which is fine, because I didn’t have to, and I eventually got my dream internship inside the 30 Rock building without losing any teeth to a travel size deodorant again.
Still waiting on that lifelong friendship with Lorne Michaels and/or Brian Williams to happen, though.
