First Day of the Rest of My Life!?

I'm back from my amazing Berlin-Prague-Vienna tour! I don't really have the energy to write on this right now, but I think as work news slows I can go back and document all.

I decided to forego second interviews etc. and take the job with VV, of which I just finished my second day. I know that sentence doesn't work in the grammatical sense, but it does illustrate the state of my brain. The first day was wonderful; I showed up at 2:00 PM and was given tea and chocolate bears with marshmallow stuffing. I browsed some catalogues and took off around 5:30 or 6:00. Best internship ever? Not so fast. Day 2 started with writing copy for a press release. In French. I can barely order a baguette without shaking in fear, so this was a challenge to say the least. Thank you a million times, whoever built in the thesaurus for Microsoft Word! This may have saved my life today. Afterwards I had lunch by myself at a bar. I have a new pick-up line as a result: just go up to a girl and start saying your number. Or a boy. It probably would be funny to a native speaker, but it took me three times of asking the guy to repeat himself before I got the joke. The latter half of the day was spent compiling a contact list. This is something that requires a person, but just barely. Remember that gorilla Coco? She might be able to do it, too. I basically just looked up all the websites of all the companies that were at Berlin Fashion Week and wrote their emails into an Excel Spreadsheet. There are ten lists of companies, so far I'm on the Bs of the second list. For distraction, my boss Jean-Paul keeps the radio on. It's one of those top 40 stations, so now I know all the words to all the cool songs. Literally, all the words. After one day. The playlist repeats a lot.

Something I have already learned is that if I ever start my own business, I will hire a few people to work for me right away. I understand why Jean-Paul hired an inept intern; it gets really lonely just staring at a computer by yourself all day. He left me alone for about an hour, and I can't say how excited I was when a delivery guy showed up. I think I made him uncomfortable with my enthusiasm. Jean-Paul starts work before I do, doesn't take a lunch, and finishes at least an hour after I do. He's single, and doesn't seem to have any evening plans ever. If I had to choose between his job and selling at the GAP, it would be a close call. I don't know how he does it, and I hope I never have to. It's not the hours, but the lack of company is depressing.

Despite the mental exhaustion/ennui, I'm really glad to be doing this internship. I think that I've already learned a lot, and I'm getting three months to see what I like (or don't like) about work environments and this line of work. Plus I really like those chocolate marshmallow bear candies.