New Beginnings

Guy starts a new internship, badly, and then insults various places in the UK.

Transcript

Welcome to the one-hundred-and-second episode of The Undercover Intern podcast, coming to you live from the centre of London. I'm your host, Guy Snapdragon, and today is Monday the 13th of January 2025.

We are sponsored this week by The Maywentery Golf Course. Welcoming men of all abilities since 1923. I should just say that the ‘all abilities’ thing has limits. If you’re two standard deviations or more below the mean, you’re going to irritate other golfers and create a disturbance. Just stay away. As of January 1st, all male members over 70 years of age will need to take a ‘mature golfer’ review, involving a full physical examination and a calculus test. Please also provide a recent solid stool sample to reception at your earliest convenience. 

We’ll get into my new undercover internship in a moment, but first, Bruce from Sydney has been in touch again to point out that his new year’s resolution is to adopt a cat, and not a child as I reported last week. Well I looked at your original email Bruce and you’re absolutely correct, there is no mention whatsoever of a child. Your concern about it scratching the furniture makes more sense now. The mistake is a reminder to all of us, especially to my producer Robert, to pay better attention to detail otherwise you’ll be out of a job. OK? It’s never a good idea to let the talent urge enrolment of a cat into a human school. We all sound stupid. That said, much of my other advice to you still applies Bruce, and it’s going to be so much easier with a cat, I think. And if it gets run over or poisoned you’ll eventually get over it, and that isn’t always the case with a child.

I am delighted to welcome non-interns and non-intern-aspirants and non-intern-close-blood-relatives to this podcast. The money from the government’s Internship Innovation Fund came through and so I guess this podcast is now officially a public good. The Undercover Intern is the two-times runner up for The Interns’ Choice Award at the Internship Podcasting Awards, so you are in capable hands. I’d love to meet some of you – not in person, obviously, but via email. So please introduce yourself at undercoverinternguy all one word at Gmail dot com, that’s undercoverinternguy@gmail.com 

For new listeners I need to reiterate that you cannot multi-task while listening to this podcast because it’s so complex and multilayered. I recommend sitting on your most comfortable chippendale chair in a moderately candle-lit drawing room, ideally with a perfumed ornamental ball on the go. High-quality over-ear headphones are essential. Perhaps a glass of fine whisky by your side, unless you’re prone to dipsomania. Then take a few deep breaths and press play. Let me into your life and I promise a long journey of moderate enjoyment. 

I arrived for work in Canary Wharf at 7:30 sharp this morning and, to cut a long story short, my internship will be 100% home-based. There will be no office space for me whatsoever at the Canary Wharf HQ, as security made plenty clear. By the time I’d popped into the hospital and hobbled home I was late to log on for my first day with Focgee – where the client is loved two point zero - which is an automatic verbal warning. By this I mean someone from their People Success Team called me on Zoom. He didn’t formally introduce himself as such, but he was wearing a People Success Team cap and waving a yellow People Success Team flag in his right hand while chanting ‘verbal warning number one’ over and over. He was also jogging up and down on the spot, like on an imaginary treadmill, and pointing at me with his left index finger. Can you imagine having to watch somebody do this for an hour on your first day of an internship? I wasn’t even given a chance to explain why I was late as I was automatically muted. I obviously tried miming what happened but someone turned my camera off in the middle of my canary impression. Why this call had to last 60 minutes, I’ve no idea. This guy’s job is just to humiliate people who are late? To be fair though, physically he looked stunningly fit, especially in those tight shorts and with his top off, and he seemed to be enjoying himself, so who am I to judge? That’s not a job you want to be doing in your 50s  or 60s though. Also, when you think about it, my camera can’t have been turned off by the guy actually giving me the verbal warning because his hands and mouth were occupied throughout. So there must have been at least one other person on the call who turned my camera off. I talk a lot about efficiency on this podcast and what you have here is a textbook example of corporate waste. There’s somebody jogging on the spot, me watching him jogging on the spot, and then somebody watching me watching him jogging on the spot. The opportunity costs of this call alone were probably a thousand pounds. I covered opportunity costs in detail way back in episode four, so you should all understand the concept by now. Even now, millions are listening to me describe how somebody was jogging on the spot while I was watching him jogging on the spot while I was being watched by somebody as I was watching him jogging on the spot. It’s a complete waste of time. 

Working from home just isn’t ideal. My landlord already claims I’m operating a business by recording this podcast here, in contravention of my lease conditions. I’m pretty sure that’s not true but it’s one reason that we’ll be moving soon to a proper studio. It ain’t worth the hassle to argue. My landlord is the kind of person who’ll make my life difficult purely for his own entertainment. Like I asked before Christmas if I can paint the walls in my bedroom purple, because at the moment they’re this kind of 1970s green-brown colour, like an alien has vomited after eating too many lava lamps, and his response was, and I quote, “I don’t see any human behaviour as a given.” What’s that supposed to mean? The heating’s broke and after begging him for weeks to fix it he literally just now texted me, “Absent action, all animals are sad.” Am I supposed to decipher this? Am I the animal? I think he wants me to leave so he can increase the rent and find some other idiot to live there.

But I don’t know, he’s such a strange guy and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t need my money. Like he’s got this website and when you go to it there’s just a drawing of an old man brushing his teeth. Except the man doesn’t even have any teeth, he just has knives in his mouth where the teeth should be. And these knives are all different kinds, some really sharp ones, a steak knife, a bread knife, a boning knife,  one of those knives you use to spread butter, a swiss army knife. It’s a really intricate drawing but what kind of person even imagines that, let alone makes a website of it? He was telling me he registered it in 1996, and it’s just his name dot com and he’s got a really common name, right, and it’s also almost exactly the name of a company in the UK. He was telling me how that company tried to buy the website name from him for a six-figure sum back in 1999 but he refused A six-figure sum! It’s this kind of realistic almost Vermeer-esque painting showing this decrepit old man in a filthy vest and he’s looking into one of those shaving mirrors and that’s how you can see all the mouth-knives, right, because they’re magnified by this shaving mirror. You try and click on the knives but there’s no links, no writing at all on the website, just this creepy picture. And it’s been there for almost thirty years, and apparently gets hundreds of visits a day from people wanting to buy beer. Well, you can’t buy beer or anything else from this website. I won’t tell you his name because honestly you do not want to look at this.

Before we begin, one other bit of housekeeping. We are making plans for some live shows in the UK and beyond over the summer. We’ll be hitting a few of the places we visited during our winter 2023 tour, including the wonderful Princess Theatre in Torquay. Stay tuned for more details. Unfortunately, and mainly for safety reasons, we won’t be able to visit Wales at all this year. In the spirit of starting the new year in peace, I apologise again for any offence I may have once caused members of this proud nation. For new listeners, this goes back to a joke I made during the farming internship episode 16 regarding the age of consent for livestock, exacerbated perhaps by my light-hearted impersonation of Neil Kinnock during the Swansea live show in episode 47. I know that this podcast is somehow banned in much of south Wales, and whilst I respect that I remain hopeful of reconciliation given the fullness of time.

I’m not sure whether we’ll make it all the way up to Scotland either, and almost certainly not to Northern Ireland because of the troubles. The last time I was in Manchester I got food poisoning so I’m not going back there. Maybe Bristol, but is that too close to Wales and full of hippies? I’ll need to wait for my EU arrest warrant to expire before going back, so probably nothing in mainland Europe until later this decade. We’ll work full details out soon, but stay tuned, certainly if you’re in the Greater London Area or the South Devon Coastal Area.

The topic for today’s show was supposed to be networking, but I think we’ll have to move it to next week. Sorry, but this pain on my left is getting worse and worse - there must be cracked ribs. I tell you something though: I am determined to make my time at Focgee – where the client is loved two point zero – a great experience. I don’t think I’ve even done a quotation yet for this episode? I had one about networking but what’s the point of a quote for a show that isn’t happening? I need to find something uplifting. Here, let’s try this: Open quotation To know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end – and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it is possible to play it with a kind of joy. Question mark, I think. End quotation. Maybe that’s not uplifting, actually, but what I’m trying to convey is that however many physical beatings I receive, however many nightmares I have about being chased by the knife-mouth man, I get to play this game we call life, and I choose to play it with joy. Thank you for letting me play with you.

I’ve been your host, Guy Snapdragon. May you use your time wisely, and may your use of wise be timely.