I Want To Go Too!

What a week. A week of productivity and pain. It was productive for, well, all the obvious reasons, but the pain...oh, the pain. One of my bosses is going overseas for almost a month! *SWOON* I just wanted to say, "Obviously, since I am the intern, you can't go anywhere without me, because everything would just fall apart. I am integral to anything you need to do overseas. Therefore it is not me just trying to be self serving when I tell you that you MUST take me along, but rather for your own good." But I didn't. I just died a little bit inside when I got the order to start researching airfare. On a positive note, I could start working for a travel agent, so expert am I at navigating the Travelocity and Expedia scene after studying abroad. Finding a cheap, multi-city/country plane ticket was no sweat. But inside, my heart broke a little.

But what else...OH! We have two displays that my bosses take with them to conferences which cause some problems. Think back to third grade when you had to make projects on the three panel cardboard things, and that's pretty much what I was dealing with. The issue is that they're covered in fabric, and the display pieces are velcro-ed to panels. While the pictures and stuff stay just fine, there's a piece that sits on top of the display and velcros onto the back. Well, the fabric is getting worn, because the display has been assembled and disassembled many times. so the velcro doesn't hold anymore. In the middle of a meeting last week, the display fell apart while my boss was giving a talk. Hmmmmmmm...embarassing.

So it was my job, as the intern, to call the company that makes these displays to see if they'd had an issue with the fabric wearing before and what they did to fix it. The lady I talked to was SO indignant that I was calling to report an issue. She made it sound like I was maligning her product and impuning the quality of the velcro they use. I was like, um, excuse me, this is your product and it failed. Don't try to make this my fault. She informed me that they'd NEVER had an issue like this before, and the only thing she could suggest to us was to flip the display upside down. Upside down? Really? That's the best you can suggest? At this point I didn't know that everything on the display was velcroed on, so it wouldn't be an issue to make them right side up. I was flabbergasted by her suggestion, thinking that this woman was crazy if she thought it would be acceptable for us to put up our display at a conference upside down. I thanked her very much, and looked at my boss, then looked at the display, then looked at my boss again and said, "She thinks we should flip it upside down." And my boss said, "Yes, that's a great idea! I didn't think to do that." I thought everyone had lost their everloving mind. "The pictures are all velcro too, so how about you just flip them around and test the piece on top and we'll call it good." Revelation! And so it was done. Oh, the joys of interning.