The earnest young intern had been sent up from Human Resources with a shy smile under her perky nose. Even though she was an Art Major at the local college, she’d been assigned to Accounting this morning because the regular intern had called in sick at the very last minute.
The irritable Chief Accountant took one look at her resume and yelled in the phone for awhile, hung up, shrugged and yanked out a chair from the receptionist’s desk.
“Just answer the phone and write messages on, on, uh…” the big beefy man looked helpless. “Oh, on one of these,” He grabbed a stack of blank invoice pads and shoved them at the intern.
It quickly got busy. It was only a week until April 15 and honest taxpaying citizens were looking for loopholes.
The pretty intern never got flustered. She dutifully noted down names and figures on one invoice pad after another all day long.
At the end of the day the pace slowed. They gave her some filing to do. She had been ready to go long before that. She just kind of stuffed some of the messages she never had gotten around to delivering here and there.
She never came to Accounting again. But Accounting had some interesting counting to do the next few weeks.
—
Brian Kenyon, a freelance journalist based in northern California, has pursued other not overtly related employment opportunities as well, having worked as a San Francisco taxi driver, an apartment complex manager, and a professional psychology school librarian among various equally revealing positions.
