Twilight Zone

Today I put in my notice that I would be leaving my internship. I am moving on to bigger and better things… another unpaid internship. Before you ask, I can answer you. Yes, I always imagined not getting paid for the work I do. Some may see this as a lateral move as opposed to a step up, but I can assure you that I also have no idea whether it is a lateral move or a step up. But what I do know is that I am making moves, and that is important no matter where you are. I was dangerously close to developing career blood clots at my old internship so I had to shake my career legs out.


With my new internship comes a new driving route. And with that comes several new grey hairs and an unimaginable amount of U-turns. I was asked to drive a script out to a woman’s apartment and after roughly 15 U-turns within two blocks of my destination (the numbers on buildings are so small these days) I parked, thinking I had survived all the annoying, time wasting obstacles I would encounter on this trip. I was wrong. The woman I was to give the script to was not home, and after circling the building three times (on foot) to make sure all exits were sealed, I was finally let into the main office. Where I found myself in the middle of a drama between two elderly female tenants of the complex. They both wanted to help me. I was so thankful, until I realized their help was the annoying, time wasting obstacle I had hoped to avoid.

While one tried to open each individually locked mailbox with her own mail key, the other whispered to me about her fellow tenant’s rude husband. And the fact that the office was never open. I told her she was preaching to the choir, that I also needed that office to be open so that I could leave this script in good hands, hoping to hint that I had places to be and speed up this process a bit. But she had already abandoned that topic of conversation and was on to telling me about how her toilet didn’t work. I smiled politely and said things like, “well that’s never good” and just as I had almost completely turned my body around to make my escape, the other tenant had made her way down the line of mailboxes and was standing in front of me. She looked at me, confused, and said, "what just happened?" I told her my predicament again and she responded by trying to open each locked mailbox with her own mailbox key. Again.

I felt like I was in an episode of the twilight zone. I looked back at the woman with the broken toilet and she took my eye contact as time to tell me about her days in the beauty salon business. I began to wonder if all exits were sealed because this was a retirement community, was I allowed to be here? Finally when 'tenant with a broken toilet' told me that 'tenant with the mailbox key' took to flashing strangers I walked swiftly to the doors. I was, after all, faster than these women so my exit was much smoother than I expected it to be.

I have already learned something crucial through this internship that I had always wondered about. Mailbox keys do actually only open your mailbox. No cutting corners there.