It’s the middle of July. It’s so beautiful out. The sun shines down on you as you walk to your horrific desk job working in Advanced Policy Copyediting and Litigation Concerns (as an assistant). You might be thinking about how wonderful it would be to be a child again. On the beach. The sand is between your toes and you find a toad and show it to a stranger — it seems so recent, but you know it’s in the distant past. The days of an unbridled childhood summers are gone. But, it’s not all for nothing because if you do this job really good, you might be able to get another job you hate next summer, ruining your summer again.
As the sun beams into your office as you “improve the readability” of a document only three people will read, just keep it in the back of your mind: “I only need to do this for 4 months... every year… or until I get a stable job.”
You’ll be surprised how desensitized you get once you’ve subject yourself to this thought enough times.
And sure, all of your friends are out traveling the world this summer. Going to Asia and taking beautiful pictures, but don’t worry, your time will, maybe, if you’re lucky and live long enough, come! You just need to wait and wait and wait until you have enough money.
During the summer, we all want to attend concerts, go to the beach and love life a little, but is that really feasible and, dare I say it, worth it? You can only love life so much, at least that’s what you’ll have to teach yourself because loving life won’t be an option between the months of April and September for a few, if not many, years.
At least next summer, if you impress your current manager, you might get the chance to get a job that requires the exact same skills, has no major pay increase, but is also somehow more boring. And yes, before you ask, the people you work with are even more disinterested in your existence. Who knows, you might even get the chance to move to a new city and miss out on a whole new urban experience as well as its summertime festivities.
To be completely fair, even without an internship, we all work during the summer in some respect. Whether you’re working in modern co-working space to make money so you can pay your rent and not die, or you’ve just had a long day of wandering Bangkok taking pictures with your expensive camera — if it’s going in our portfolio, it’s basically a full-time job — it’s all hard work!
So pore and pore over those obscure documents that no one — not even your boss — reads because if you catch some spelling mistakes, you might even get a chance to leave work earlier, which will of course be offset by your boss’s long and uninteresting praise for work that you don’t even consider passable. You only have to do this every summer!
The Dingbat is The Ubyssey's humour column, so if you didn't laugh that's our fault.