Last year I happened to be working as an internee at one of the renowned telecom companies of the country. As engineering interns there, we were asked to look after and screen the incoming faulty devices from the sites and to find out if they really had some problem or it was just the negligence of the workman present on the spot that the apparatus had been declared as faulty.
We had quite a cumbersome job of attaching and up linking different telecom related stuff which included costly modems. A single chip present there costed something around 12 thousand rupees and were too many of such present in our screening lab. So we had to be extra careful during the work in order to protect any big damage to the expensive apparatus. Three interns were assigned this task, one of which was me.
The other two interns present in the lab had greater experience than me, they used to show their superiority over me. I quite often tried to tell them if something was wrong but they would never listen to me and the conversation always ended in a rude tone in which they always used to say ‘You have no idea of this at all, we have more experience than you and now you will tell us what is right and what is wrong’. Both of them were my seniors so I always used to keep quiet and never spoke a word afterwards in front of them.
With the passage of time my relation with one of my seniors got better and we became more like friends, after which he stopped blaming me or showing that I was inferior somehow. But the other one never stopped. It seemed that this guy had some problem with me and would leave no chance to embarrass me.
It was now my fifth and last week at the internship that we received a notification from the admin that the CEO would like to visit the scanning lab in order to check how well it is performing and how the staff there is checking all the apparatus. We were given two days margin to prepare ourselves and the admin also told us that one of us will have to inform the CEO about all the happenings and the way the apparatus is checked in the lab. Being junior most I was in no way the option to be selected for the intro and description, that left my two seniors being the only choice. In order to show the CEO how good he is with this stuff my senior, the one with the superiority complex, voluntarily decided to describe everything to him. According to him it was his chance to impress the CEO and grab a seat in the firm as a new entrée. He prepared quite well and all the lab was cleaned, all the apparatus was tagged, related goods were placed at their places and everything looked in its position.
Finally the day came, the CEO arrived. He was informed about everything by this intern. He showed him the progress report, method that he followed to check everything, the list of all the money he had saved by finding correct apparatus that had been marked wrong earlier on, in a nutshell he impressed the CEO with his overall performance but then when the CEO was just about to leave, this senior of mine asked him to check one more thing for which they had to walk a few steps. The CEO went first followed by this intern then something strange happened, this intern got his feet entangled in an extension wire that made him slip, but what’s more interesting is that he didn’t just slip, he slipped a lot due to the slippery marble floor and BANG, he got smashed straight into the CEO ramming with such a force that he fell with this intern all over him. Everybody ran and picked up both, the intern was fired straight away and even his experience certificate at the firm was cancelled.
Even today when I recall this I bust into laughter!!!