If I was omniscient, I would have known to quit my internship right then during finals week, while I was ahead of the game after three good days of shooting. But I had no idea of that at the time. Once the semester ended, I started working in their office. I was assigned to shadow Bill, their director of operations, which usually entailed sitting in his office listening to him make phone calls. During the exciting moments, I would walk across the hall to retrieve a printout from the copy machine. Occasionally during the receptionist's lunch hour, I would answer the phones, which was the most stressful task ever. “So I am just supposed to wait here until this phone rings at random, and then pick it up, to talk with a complete stranger, who isn't looking for me, and whose questions I can't answer? Awesome.” I figure I had a fifty-fifty chance of hanging up on someone instead of transferring their call, because of how unintuitive their phone system was, and no one was around during lunch anyway. Since I never had the answers to their questions, I have no idea why we didn't just let all of the calls go to voice mail during lunch.
On some days I would get sent downstairs to the machine room, which was much more interesting, but I usually just observed what was going on. I would frequently be able to assist with issues or head off problems based on what I would learn from sitting in Bill's office upstairs for so long. But for the most part I actually did very little. Besides one other random afternoon shoot, I never did anything exciting, or went anywhere for the rest of the summer that I worked there. Luckily I was alternating between working there and back at the tech department at the college, where I was still the student supervisor, so that was the opposite work environment.
I was living on campus again that summer, and this time with two of my closest friends. It is the only time I have ever really been close with my roommates, and we had long talks every night. The topics were usually the same, centering on girls and relationships. We came from opposite perspectives, with one of my roommates Ben, who we called the "chick magnet," because he was beating off girls with a stick. The funniest part was that he was clueless to the fact that this was not “normal” since it was all he had ever experienced. He didn't get much sympathy from my other roommate, who had pursued girls fairly aggressively, without ever getting any positive results, ever. I was sort of in the middle, in that I had a girlfriend, but had never had any positive progress with girls outside of that specific relationship, which wasn’t even at my own initiative.
Another significant event that took place at the beginning of that summer was that my grandmother passed away. She hadn't been able to recognize me since her stroke five years before, and she had been paranoid schizophrenic for the ten years prior to that, so we weren't particularly "close" by any stretch of the imagination. But it was still an ordeal for the family to get through.
Once I got back to Southern California , I spent the rest of the summer bouncing between my internship and my job on campus. I did admittedly learn a few things from my internship, but to say that my talents were underutilized would be a serious understatement. I didn't actually get much accomplished while I worked there, which was not an issue I had ever really experienced in the past. Fortunately, my next internship did not suffer from the same problem.
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