It’s So Weird But I Can’t Stop Reading!

My husband owns a small plumbing business that primarily does labor but also runs a small retail storefront with parts and basic appliances, etc. Every so often, my husband will participate in a jobs-readiness program with the local high school where they take on student interns for a semester. The students get credit and experience in the working world, and the companies they work for get free labor and some positive community exposure.

Usually, the kids are great — sometimes better than the paid employees. But this semester he got [Intern]. Here is a brief sampling of [Intern]’s misadventures in the four hours a week he spends clerking in my husband’s storefront.

One of his biggest jobs is to answer the phone. On his first day, he was instructed to pick up and say this:

Greeting: “[Plumbing Business]! Don’t forget to ask about our seasonal maintenance deal specials! How can we help you today?”

Instead, he was answering the business phone this way:

Intern: “[Intern] residence. Who’s calling, please?”

When confronted, he explained that he had forgotten the greeting, and this was how his mother had taught him to answer phones.

On [Intern]’s first day of work, my husband did the standard welcome he does for all new employees: he brought in donuts and gathered everyone around to meet the new guy. [Intern] was asked to say a few words about himself.

Intern: “I chose this job because all the good ones were taken.”

And when he was asked what he knew about plumbing, he told a detailed story of a toilet-clogging dump he had taken a few months before.

One day, [Intern] was asked to clean the break room kitchen. Someone had happened to bring in bagels. He threw out all the poppyseed bagels because “they had mold on them.”

My husband took [Intern] to a job site once to get a feel for interacting with customers and basic repairs. [Intern] asked the client if he could take home a framed photo of the client’s teenage daughter hanging in the living room.

For the first couple of weeks, [Intern] kept stealing lunches from the break room and then denying he had done it when the other employees called him on it. (It’s a small business and it’s obvious when someone has your food.) Then, he tried to pay them to give him their lunches.

On the first day that he brought his own lunch, he brought a pound of raw chuck and complained of an unsuitable work environment when my husband informed him there was nowhere for him to grill it at the store. He ate it raw. He got sick and had to go to the hospital.

The company was hosting a holiday coat drive, and [Intern] was asked to type up the flyer. Understanding his limits by this point, they just instructed him to alter the date on the previous year’s flyer. He still managed to mess even that up, and he didn’t notice until he had printed 250 full-color copies of the flyer. He thought if he threw the flyers out, no one would know. But he threw them out in the main office trash can.

[Intern] has definitely never so much as seen drugs in his life, but he’s always talking like he’s an Original Gangster. He approached a large, tattooed, black employee at the business (who is actually a church pastor, an addiction counselor, and a volunteer sheriff) and tried to buy drugs from him.

To impress a girl, [Intern] volunteered to watch her dogs — while working. [Intern] actually walked out of work to chat her up, and she asked him to watch them while she went into a store where dogs weren’t allowed. After about fifteen minutes, [Intern] got tired of waiting for her and let the dogs loose. She came back looking for him and he pretended as though he’d never met her. He knew where she was when he let them go! (My husband says the girl got her dogs back.)

[Intern] had a decent amount of money saved from birthdays and Christmases. He often likes to “flex” on the other employees that he doesn’t need to work. He is just doing this for school; he has all the money he’ll ever need. But it turns out that he doesn’t even have it anymore because he lost all of it going long on GameStop at the height of the frenzy. He is irate that he could not sell his stock back at the original price and still on some level believes he was scammed.

[Intern] has aspirations to be a famous TikToker, so he’s always setting up these asinine “pranks” like trying to bust in on people while using the toilet, rigging heavy objects to fall on people, or yelling “FIRE” when there is no fire. That pushes my husband and the others in charge to meet to discuss cutting [Intern], but they decide the entertainment value of his [Intern]-ness is worth sticking it through to the end of the semester.

It all makes sense when we meet [Intern]’s mother. She recently came in and confronted my husband.

Intern’s Mother: “Why isn’t [Intern] being paid for his work?!”

Husband: “This is a for-credit program through the high school.”

My husband thought [Intern] might’ve intentionally misled his mother, but no matter how he explained it, she didn’t get it and kept insisting he pay [Intern].

[Intern]’s mother knocked over an entire display on her way in and did not acknowledge it, try to clean it, or offer to pay for what was broken. In fact, she charged right ahead with making her original demands.

[Intern]’s dad is not in the picture, and he’s been calling my husband and a couple of the other guys at work “Dad” semi-jokingly. When his mother came in, after making her demands for payment, she asked my husband how he plans to stay in [Intern]’s life if this is really only a semester.

[Intern] turned eighteen last month. He celebrated by getting a tattoo of Calvin from “Calvin And Hobbes” peeing over his left peck, with his nipple serving as the penis. We know because he showed an infection on the site to a young family who’d come in to buy an L pipe.

That’s the crux of [Intern] the Junior Plumber for you.