We are summer interns at the
Washington Center Internship
Program, an organization that places college students in internship positions, provides housing, and offers lectures and classes for academic credit during the internship. Although we’re not having the “office furniture” experience, we identified with and laughed over your satirical treatise on the internship experience (“Intern Guide,” 6/20). The Washington Center, namely the pixie in charge of external affairs, was not so amused. More accurately, as seems to be the case with many Washington Center officials, she missed the point entirely.
The pixie in question is a bromide-spouting Susan Powter clone who makes a Xerox look original. She actually sent out a memo to all Washington Center interns with a fill-in-the-blanks response letter that she “suggested” we send back to you. It sure is a good thing she gave them to uswe were running low on toilet paper. Not only does she not trust us to formulate our own responses to your article, she also wanted us to mention the Washington Center at least twice in every sentence (not in the name of advertising, of course).
While we are perceptive enough to realize both your satiric motive for the article and the semi-fascist motive behind the pixie’s crusade, we are sure that you will receive some suspiciously alike documents from other Washington Center interns who have swallowed the Washington Center’s unofficial but pervasive motto: WISM (What’s In It For Me). Wake up and laugh a little, Washington Center, it’s not the ’80s anymore.
Washington, D.C.