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HA FREAKING HA:
-so there I was, being not entirely sure that anyone at Zombies, Inc had even ever read the FLSA rules on having unpaid interns. Wednesday afternoon I get emailed an offer letter and told to sign it, which I assume is a primitive way of demonstrating what, to them, might seem to be the most important item on the list of internship rules; that I wasn't expecting them to pay me. I read it, and then I point out, very politely, that the agreement explicitly refers to college credit (this being the default token way to demonstrate that it's okay for you to not pay someone to work for you) and asking if it ought to be amended or if I should just sign it anyway (because I don't care). They said they'd fix it and get back to me. This never happened, so I just showed up today at the appointed time.
The first thing managerlady (she needs a sufficiently droll name, and I am sure fate will provide her with one shortly) said was 'O dang I forgot to tell you to bring your laptop.' Note that I was never, at any point, asked if I owned a laptop and it's been a fairly recent life development for me, but yeah, I am so deep in the rich-kids bubble here that they think Macbooks grow on trees and that even unpaid staff ought to be able to verily produce them from their assholes to be put to company use. Lol startups, maybe. I spent the day reading Very Important Things on other people's machines. I could tell they were important because they were full of words I had previously only come across in Metal Gear cutscenes and I filed away a few interesting concepts for sci-fi plots to not write.
And the second thing she said was that the offer letter hadn't been fixed yet because they weren't certain about the legalities of not paying me, therefore they might have to pay me. I nobly said that I wouldn't complain about such an eventuality. By the end of the day this turned into 'oops, we'll pay you, and because one of us was forced to read the FLSA website you also get a fixed term of 3 months'.
It's not a lot of money and it's only three days a week but hell yes. conclusion: it's amazing what you can accidentally bullshit your way into if you already have enough hereditary economic privilege to get through the door, and this is why everything sucks.
-about the other days of the week; the nicest person from the Mob called again and apologised for not contacting me for a month, and I said I still had one and a half free days midweek if she wanted them, plus Saturdays. Yeah, I am doing this. Honestly, I do better with more structured time and more immediate objectives, as a rule.
-I think the Dingbat is either done with me OR the Useless People are tired of his bullshit - either way, they decided to pick today to pretend to be less Useless than is customary. I enlightened them as to their excellent timing but told them I was still up for part-time gigs because I have no idea what the Mob are actually doing.
-yesterday I found out that Hotel Chocolat have two shops in the whole of America and today I tested the walking distance from Zombies, Inc to one of them. Oh dear.
-so now I need to set up a second user account on my computer; another extraneous virtual self with vital pieces removed in order to prevent engagement.
The first thing managerlady (she needs a sufficiently droll name, and I am sure fate will provide her with one shortly) said was 'O dang I forgot to tell you to bring your laptop.' Note that I was never, at any point, asked if I owned a laptop and it's been a fairly recent life development for me, but yeah, I am so deep in the rich-kids bubble here that they think Macbooks grow on trees and that even unpaid staff ought to be able to verily produce them from their assholes to be put to company use. Lol startups, maybe. I spent the day reading Very Important Things on other people's machines. I could tell they were important because they were full of words I had previously only come across in Metal Gear cutscenes and I filed away a few interesting concepts for sci-fi plots to not write.
And the second thing she said was that the offer letter hadn't been fixed yet because they weren't certain about the legalities of not paying me, therefore they might have to pay me. I nobly said that I wouldn't complain about such an eventuality. By the end of the day this turned into 'oops, we'll pay you, and because one of us was forced to read the FLSA website you also get a fixed term of 3 months'.
It's not a lot of money and it's only three days a week but hell yes. conclusion: it's amazing what you can accidentally bullshit your way into if you already have enough hereditary economic privilege to get through the door, and this is why everything sucks.
-about the other days of the week; the nicest person from the Mob called again and apologised for not contacting me for a month, and I said I still had one and a half free days midweek if she wanted them, plus Saturdays. Yeah, I am doing this. Honestly, I do better with more structured time and more immediate objectives, as a rule.
-I think the Dingbat is either done with me OR the Useless People are tired of his bullshit - either way, they decided to pick today to pretend to be less Useless than is customary. I enlightened them as to their excellent timing but told them I was still up for part-time gigs because I have no idea what the Mob are actually doing.
-yesterday I found out that Hotel Chocolat have two shops in the whole of America and today I tested the walking distance from Zombies, Inc to one of them. Oh dear.
-so now I need to set up a second user account on my computer; another extraneous virtual self with vital pieces removed in order to prevent engagement.
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The jobs I end up in - I've read some indications that small businesses can become a resume curse, in today's change-averse world where no one wants to stick you in a big business office unless you already have experience of an essentially identical job. (Shocking fact of the day, unpaid internships don't help students find jobs, at all, in any field.)
imo the Peter Principle effect that I most often see in small businesses is bosses who had to go into business for themselves because they couldn't hold down a job working for anyone else, but who are not actually good at organising a business and managing employees. Would not be surprised if this was as much of a thing in startups as on streetfronts.
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haHA yes, this. (What is it about restaurateur-ing that draws batshit people with NO EXPERIENCE OR KNOWLEDGE of how to actually run a restaurant [or, alterntatively, a B&B]? Of course if they have a scrap of sense they hire a general manager who has restaurant experience, but, PETER PRINCIPLE lol. This describes most of the people I have worked for.) Anyway what is this company even doing? And what are you doing? I don't understand business at all ._.
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The company makes & sells really detailed profiles of investors in a specific area, one that's niche enough that I don't want to be too specific so let's say that they help evil overlords finance the apocalypse. I am an investor researcher! This involves a lot of database trawling and filling in of boxes in other databases. It's honestly going to help me out a lot resumewise as a lot of the jobs I would like to have require one to have worked with various types of financial entity, know how they operate, etc, and this ought to let me learn about them all at once. I was willing to do this for free while I was studying so getting paid for it will be sweet, at least once I get settled in. Bonus; they kind of want to fire their bookkeeper, who is on vacation this week. When she gets back they want me to start learning her job 'just in case'.
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It's the same in IT, except recruiters demand a long list of TLAs and offer for £14k p.a. (Also, job adverts for two-year old technology will always demand three year's experience.)
But I think accountancy has seeped into your soul: one of HMRC's objections to paying me tax credits was that my project was in a permanent state of "teething troubles". Well, I uploaded it to iTunes this morning. Have you heard of the ninety-nine rule? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule) As an example, I rewrote our renderer as a raytracer in four hours; it's working but there are a couple of glitches that will take me days to fix. I don't know what any of this means, only that the will to succeed is important. I also agree small businesses are inept, but successful ones manage to latch on to customers even more inept than themselves. WRT the will to succeed and small businesses read this (http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201203#26) (it's long, and you might not follow all the TLAs, but the pay off is true).
I have never owned a laptop. But my Windows' "wallpaper" is the Mac I'm logged into. I want to like it--it's unix with a slick UI--but...I don't know. And it costs twice as much and runs half as fast as my desktop. The graphics is shit, too (Intel GMA, FFS?). And the previous one is the only computer I've ever had fail irreparably.
All that aside, it sound to me as if you've been really jammy - your bank balance takes less of a hit and you can a proper job on your CV.
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Thanks for the links! I had not heard of that rule, no - I tend to file that kind of issue under Pareto Principle. The TLA problem infects all of human life; the only non-useless one among the Useless People (lol, I got an email on Monday saying he no longer worked for them) bitched about employers demanding workers who had experience of particular pieces of software even in cases where it obviously doesn't matter what software you're using provided you know what it does.
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My mother is like that bookkeeper, even now; in her case it's a lack of empathy. And then my app went onto iTunes with an embarrassing bug. I explained to the client that we should have given it out to a people on the waiting list to test; to me it was an obvious thing and I knew we were derelict in not doing it, but his response made it seem like a new idea. Dumbness and lack of experience look very similar. The not checking a laptop is because they come from a different world: in your world people don't necessarily have laptops; in their world, I guess, everybody has. They'll learn to develop procedures. It's irritating watching people learn stuff afresh, but the most irritating thing is that people like that succeed.
At your age, I ended up embarking on a epic project. The people I was working with waved their hands and hoped the details would magically resolve themselves. But these people were decades older than me so I didn't have the seniority to drag them down to earth. I frequently ended up arguing the toss but received no credit when hindsight showed I was right; all I did was make people's lives more miserable (mine, especially). So in the end, I quit. But despite their lack of realism they dragged the project to a conclusion on their own, albeit some very dodgy manoeuvres.
I have lightened up considerable since then. You can learn something from the head-in-clouds people - look at how often you've lucked into things. So I say: be patient and gnomically sagacious; you're the adult and you've got to educate them to different mindset. (Be aware it's very difficult to separate inexperience from stupidity.) But if you're constantly causing or receiving agro then get out. And on a practical front, steer the project into phases; don't disparage them but move the big ideas into version 2 and get an achievable version 1.