Pete’s week

Working terrifies me, so I intend to avoid it forever. I live in constant fear of succumbing; of choking my life away in a greyscale mushroom cloud of spreadsheets and woe. Of signing up at 21, and being turfed out at 70, mind and body roughly like a mashed potato, wondering why these chittering halfwits are calling me ‘pappy’ and sobbing at my bedside. There are no good jobs. That’s not the point. Get to the bones-and-gore hellish centre of it all, and it’s hard to take even the greatest job without thinking “so it’s come to this.” Something that Princess Diana learned to her cost. She’s dead, by the way. I think this proves my point.So it’s hard to see the attraction in internships. If only fools and horses work, God knows what this makes interns. Mincing dunderheads trailing higher cretins, tumbling through closed windows in a furrowed, hapless failure to grasp reality. It’s a modern illustration of The Ascent of Man; monkeys following monkeys, and it’ll be a million years until we find one that’s even nearly human. From my vast experience of asking people about internships, I know that your time there will fall into one of the following three categories. In the first, you will do – and therefore learn – nothing. In the second, you will be the typical office serf, and therefore learn nothing. In the third, you will actually be given a job, and learn that working life is an endless corridor of fear and pain. None of this seems to appeal.My terror is motivated first by laziness, but a close second is a burning wish not to lay prostrate before this temple of eerie corporate bullshit. In best rubbernecking spirit, I looked for where I might have been: law firm Slaughter and May tell me that they are “a collaboration of individuals with a shared focus.” Where the hell is the meaning there? Alvin and the Chipmunks were “individuals with shared focus”, for Christ’s sake. So are binmen. So are gang-rapists. I’ve read more substantial insights on napkins.The interns don’t understand me. They think they’ll be on a roaring jaunt, glugging prole-blood from ivory chalices, picking the chair on which to park their career until the Blackberry-waves put cancer in the testicles that half didn’t even know they had. I should offer some deterrent. At the end of The Muppet Christmas Carol, Scrooge is led to his own grave, a chilling reminder that a life in London has left him without emotion and friends. Put me in charge of the interns, and this is what they’d get: I’d staple their eyelids open, and force them to stare at their own stonewrought mortality until they beg to be useful. This’ll teach them: never dream.by Peter Bowden