Friend, Wake Up: You’re Not Inheriting the Company
This happened to a friend’s cousin:
She landed her first tech internship full of excitement. Fresh out of university, no real experience in an office like that, but determined to prove she deserved to stay. One summer Monday she got a desk and a laptop. And that’s where all momentum stopped: nobody could give her any work because she’d been assigned to a manager who was on vacation. So she waited. For what? Didn’t matter. Just wait. That’s where she first learned, the hard way, why setting work boundaries matters.
A week in that chair. Two weeks, and she already knew the whole office’s coffee break schedule. Three weeks, until her coworkers, literally, “took pity on her” and handed over some technical docs so she’d at least have something to read. Before that, they’d let slip, laughing, that the last intern had lasted exactly one week with that same manager. That she was “difficult.” A month later, she understood exactly what they meant.
When the manager finally showed up, she handed her technical docs and formatting tasks: reformatting a Word file, checking dates in a spreadsheet. Nothing close to what she’d studied for. The excitement faded week by week. The problem wasn’t the task itself, it was that nobody had any intention of teaching her anything.
In the middle of all that, a coworker with no intern of his own pulled her into a meeting room to give her, on his own initiative, an oral exam on her degree. His argument: her generation was less prepared than his. A thirty-five-year-old man needing to prove himself academically against a twenty-three-year-old. She left crying on the drive home, convinced she knew nothing and would never get anywhere.
Years later she understood that comments like that only land when the person receiving them doesn’t have the tools to shut them down yet, and that whoever needs to make someone else feel like garbage is, in fact, the actual garbage. Back then she didn’t have the tools or the experience to keep it from getting to her the way it did.
And that wasn’t even the worst part. The calls were. Her manager called her outside work hours, no real urgency, just because she could. One Saturday afternoon, she called. A Saturday, on a Monday-to-Friday contract. From then on, Sundays filled up with anxiety, stomachaches, and the creeping fear that the rest of her career would look exactly like this.
When she asked for a week off before finals, her manager told her that her internship contract didn’t give her the right to that, that she could only miss the exact hours of the exam. A lie. But she didn’t know that, and the university never introduced her to the advisor who was supposed to make sure the internship was actually fair.
The day she decided to leave, she got up from her desk and walked straight into her manager’s boss’s office to say she was done. The boss stood up, walked over to her manager’s desk, and asked her, right there, whether he could let her go now or if she had to stay a few more days. Like they were talking about a piece of furniture, not a person. The answer, delivered with an ice-cold stare, was that she had to stay until Friday, even though it was Tuesday and there was no actual work left to hand off. Later she found out that as an intern, she wasn’t even required to give notice.
What she took from all of it:
- Setting boundaries isn’t optional, it’s the only thing that protects you.
- Your free time is yours, and if you give it up once, it becomes the expectation.
- Knowing your rights is the best defense, because once you know what you’re entitled to, people stop trying.
- If your gut says this isn’t the place, it isn’t, better to listen before it starts screaming.
- And no job, no matter how much it looks like a dream from the outside, is worth your health.
Nothing bad lasts forever, not even a company built on it. Last she heard, that place had shut down and everyone had to scramble for a new job. Turns out you can’t stockpile that much bad karma for free.
If you’ve got your own workplace story to share, write to me at jenniffer@guaduastudio.com and I’ll publish it anonymously in upcoming posts. Just make sure to close your story with what you learned from it, whatever good came out of it. Thanks.
