Internships: porpoiseless, unrewarding, and sad

By Bill Marino

By now, most of you have figured out what you're going to do this summer. For a lot of us, that means internships. This, I feel, is not an acceptable practice.

An internship is an unnatural thing—we know this because internships do not occur in nature. For example, porpoises don't have internships. They don't even know what an internship is. If you ask a porpoise what an internship is, it will just make squeaky noises at you. Even if it did know what an internship was, it would only be interested if it involved getting some fish at the end. I know one who applied for an internship and got it, but when he showed up the first day, they told him he wouldn't get any fish for his efforts. Needless to say, he didn't stick around.

An internship is especially unnatural during the summer. What's the quintessential summer movie? Beach Blanket Bingo, you might answer. Well, do you think Frankie Avalon would ever want an internship? Not a chance. He was much too busy surfing and chasing girls. Now, if we assume Frankie Avalon to be what summer is all about, and we know that Frankie Avalon is not all about internships, we can therefore conclude that internships are not what summer is all about.

Take another great summer movie: Meatballs. Remember that great scene where the two teenagers kiss and their braces get stuck together? Do you think that could have happened if the two kids stayed at home to intern? I rest my case.

Perhaps the most unnatural part of an internship is the part about not getting paid. This brings me to another great movie: Annie. It's not a summer movie like the others. But Annie has a very important lesson: orphans are the only people who should work for free. If you have a mom and a dad, they should protect you from economic exploitation. On the other hand, if you have no parents, you're fair game for exploitation. Who's going to protect you? All your friends are poor, like you! This is why orphans are the only people that may rightfully be forced to work without compensation, and why orphans are the only kind of people for whom internships may be considered an appropriate endeavor.

Yet, despite this fact, almost 40 percent of the people who did internships last year were not orphans. How do we explain this? Who else is taking these jobs? Let's approach this scientifically. We know that only economically exploitable people would take an internship. Who else do we know that might fall into this category, and therefore might want an internship? I'll tell you: people with diabetes.

Diabetes is a disease invented by the baseball player Ty Cobb. People who have diabetes, because they have diabetes, are prone to forget stuff that the rest of us can easily remember. This is the unfortunate nature of the disease, and this is what makes diabetics so easy to swindle. For example, you can tell them you will be really nice to them and then be really mean to them. If they ask you why you are so mean, you can say "I warned you 15 minutes ago that I would be mean." Since they won't remember that far back, they will become ashamed and accept your exploitation of them. This is why so many diabetics are cajoled into non-paying internships and unsafe jobs. The world is very unfair to them, and this is sad, since, as I have been told, diabetics are not always born this way.

For all these reasons, I think it's time to end the practice of internships. They are clearly an irrational and inhumane tradition. There have, of course, been several notable movements to abolish internships. The most important of these was led by Ty Cobb, who, after his success with inventing diabetes, grew fond of the porpoise of whom I spoke earlier. Won over by the porpoise's pathetic tale, Cobb decided to champion the creature's cause, which was, naturally, to get some fish.

At first, the "Georgia Peach" and his sea mammal friend seemed unstoppable. But then came the booze, the lady porpoises, and the now-infamous "Blowhole" incident. Needless to say, in the end, they were successful in their noble quest, and internships were abolished in the U.S. for over five decades.

Unfortunately, the internship prohibition they engineered would survive less than two years before being repealed by an increasingly liberal Congress. Devastated, Cobb looked for other diseases to invent. The dolphin went on to win four Cy Young awards. In the early '70s, their struggle and unique man/dolphin relationship would be memorialized in the popular television show Sanford and Son.

For all these reasons, I urge you not to apply for internships and to discourage the practice in general.

Bill Marino is a sophomore in Trumbull.

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