Let Me Down and Let Me Go

Let’s have a bit of a recap on last week’s ramblings shall we:

I’m going to Sydney for a week to do work experience at a magazine. As this simple sentence implies, I will be spending a vast majority of my time there working. Although I’ve slipped in a few extra days at the end of the week, I’ll probably be so exhausted from photocopying and making people bad instant coffee that I’ll want to do nothing more than spend those days lying in my hotel bed chain smoking.

What a fine display of misjudgement those words turned out to be. It will never cease to astound me how the way you imagine something is going to be and the way it actually ends up being can differ so dramatically. But I’m getting ahead of myself already…

I have indeed spent the last week in Sydney completing an internship at one of the Australia’s leading fashion magazines. Sound exciting, doesn’t it? Sounds glamorous and worldly, doesn’t it? Well it wasn’t. The only "experience" I got out of the experience was in how to survive immense, near-unbearable boredom.

Like I did, you might justifiably assume that I would’ve been attending fashion shoots, raiding the fashion department’s stockroom and perhaps writing a thing or two for the magazine. No real level of responsibility heaped upon me, but enough immersion in the goings on to learn how it all works. Not so. The closest I got to a fashion shoot was watching a model have her hair and make up done from a room on the other side of the office. The closest I got to the fashion department’s stockroom was on the occasions where I schlepped garment bags into it all the way from the courier dock seven levels below. (These occasions happened approximately six to eight times a day and, although I was peeved at the servant-like work, I did develop some good arm muscles). As for the writing part, I actually did a lot of it. Taking down the staff’s intricate brunch orders for low fat soya dandelion teas and hard boiled eggs required quite a lot of ink to paper action.

Other exciting and enlightening duties included photocopying pages from outdated magazines, which was tedious at best but at least I learnt how to load paper into a Xerox machine. I was also allowed to show off my organisational skills when I cleaned out and restocked the office bookshelf. And let’s not forget the several hours a day I was able to master my "wrist abilities": being asked to flick through every issue of the magazine from 2001 onwards looking for articles that may or may not have even been written certainly helped hone my motor skills.

By day four of my five day stint I was utterly "over it" (as the teenagers like to say). I was actually over it by the second half of the first day but allayed my impulse to flee by self-governing my "Just shut up and fucking do it!" motto three hundred times per day. My resolve to ride it out came to an abrupt and (in my opinion) hilarious halt on Wednesday morning however. I was informed by my babysitter (the poor staff member forced to take responsibility for me over the course of the week) that a girl who was doing work experience at another magazine had called in and quit with the assertion that she was too overqualified for the position. Although I mocked her seemingly arrogant behaviour in front of the people around me, I secretly admired her audacity and bravado. I’d been thinking about doing the exact same thing since my very first day but I, being a sucker for propriety and professionalism, was too weak to go through with it. I lacked the guts to put my own potential career at stake by saying "Fuck how good this will look on my resume`, it’s not worth it".

So instead, I took the weasel’s way out: I bullshitted.

Before I continue, may I just point out that I am not proud of my course of action. Although it was a brilliant display of my elaborate scheming abilities and sheer ingenuity, it was cowardly and spineless. But I digress…

After my lunch break on Wednesday I walked back into the office. I go straight to my babysitter with a look of anguish and fear. "I just got a call from my travel agent" I say. "He said my flight on Sunday has been cancelled and now, long story short, I have to fly back to Melbourne on Friday. [Insert a fake look of my sincerest apologies]…So I won’t be coming in". The babysitter says "that sucks" and assures me that this will not be a problem. Curiously, she doesn’t think to ask me why I couldn’t just book an earlier flight on Sunday or even one on Saturday, but if she’s going to overlook this inconsistency then I’m not going to force it.

With that, I ran out of the office on Thursday afternoon (early, I might add) knowing that I had Friday, Saturday and Sunday to prowl the city at my heart’s content. And as I was emptying the contents of my bank account at various places across Sydney on the day I knew I should’ve been making brunch runs, I felt no remorse. No guilt, no shame, no regret. I considered it my own personal "fuck you" to whoever had the impudence to call this experiment in slave labour "work experience".

If you have comments about this article please email us @ comments@shebytches.com. We will post them on the right. Lauren can be contacted at lauren@shebytches.com