Intern Horror Stories

To kick it off, when I was an intern I had to help deliver ~50 PIBs to a local client and the combined stack must have weighed ~80lbs. My back was hurting for weeks after - dumping the stack into an uber - then taking it out of the uber - then walking a block - then moving it around the client office... terrible

I got off the elevator on my floor and there was a young kid looking all lost so I thought he was one of the new interns. Gave him 50 bucks and said get us coffee for the group. Kid took it got on the elevator and didn't come back, turns out he got out on the wrong floor and was actually a SA for another firm which I saw him later in the entrance of the building. Stared him down to make it awkward haha.

Had an intern come in for an interview for FT offer. Kid 1) told me the internship sucks 2) asked me if I was the receptionist (I just happened to meet him as he was walking in and I was walking out and said hello). Didn't get the job.

I know a Director who convinces/compels the most attractive female SAs into sleeping with him. Pretty fucked up, not sure how he hasn't been reported to HR yet after doing this for years.

One day the MD at a MM bank where I was interning at came up to me around 9 PM and asked me if I had my drivers license. I said "yes", to which he replied: good. report here at 6AM tomorrow. Whole floor started laughing and I taught it was a joke. To be cautionaus I still went there. Met the MD there with his BMW 7 series, telling me he found my response the night before very weird, because being his chauffeur would be a great learning opportunity.

Anyways: had to drive him to an appointment 3 hours away. When I dropped him off, I was thinking I could join (because it was going to be a good learning opportunity), but I had to wait there for 4 hours in the sun at 100 degrees in suit and tie. Almost died out there lol. When going back, he told me to turn on the radio and connect his phone. He then proceeded to listen to extremely loud hardcore. Returned at the office around 1600. Because I had some deadlines I had to keep working to around 4AM.

Had to manually type 500 business cards into excel, with names, addresses, phone numbers, and firm name.

Worked 60 hours the July fourth weekend (Saturday-Monday) on an offering, deal died next day. Worst week ever

The firm I worked for sent hand written birthday cards to every single customer. They gave me a pen and 2000 empty cards and ordered me to write the same damn text on all of them. After I was done with about 2/3 of them, the boss realized that he gave me an outdated text , so I had to start again from 0.

An intern of mine partied hard one Thursday night and decided to sleep over at the office as he lived out of town. He overslept and was woken up by a support staff and some clients. He immediately jumped up and offered coffee to the clients.

The clients, impressed as they thought he pulled an all-nighter, talked to the MD about this. Later, the MD mentioned this in the office and literally couldn't stop laughing.

Good times. Fantastic intern, reasonably nice MD, that one...

Was staffed on a live sell-side M&A deal. The client wanted to sell off a chunk of their European business. The problem was, the European business they wanted to sell off didn't have consolidated financial statements - every one of the 600+ pieces of the business had its own statements. We received them in KML format. As in Google Earth. As in, every location of the business was marked on a map, and all of its cash flows/income statement/balance sheet were stored in the comments in each pin on the map. You can guess whose job it was to go through Google Earth and manually pull out the data for each individual location and consolidate them together.

This task would have been bad enough on its own, without the two additional caveats: 1) I got this dropped on my desk at 9am Friday morning. The MD wanted the model done for Sunday evening, so the associate wanted the consolidated statements done for Saturday night.

2) Our firm's computers just couldn't handle Google Earth. So after every location, Google Earth would crash and have to be restarted.

Worst task I have seen an intern doing was to manually black line customer contracts before uploading to VDR. I mean this poor guy had to go through thousands of pages and shade customer logos and any potential reference to customer names. He quit after 2 weeks his internship started.

Bind 100 books by hand using machines from the 1990s

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Was interviewing at a superday for a DCM SA position at a global BB and the interviewer asked me to give him the PV of a bond right there with barely any details...was about $50 off. No offer.

When you are a beginner, there should be no impossible tasks for you. Nothing wrong with that. When I worked in the office of the gas company, we were sent to the filling stations for control of workers for 24 hours. Yes, sleeping on a chair outdoors is not the most enjoyable occupation, but no one complained.

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Once had to take manual screenshots of all VDR files because they weren’t available for download...

Total of around 3,000 pages. Legal was a bitch.

Putting up the office Christmas tree when I had been fairly new in my first year. 15 foot tall tree multiple parts and way too many lights to be doing that shit by myself.

Going through a client's user data in the most poorly put together spreadsheet I've ever seen. Around 10,000 lines and each line needed to be edited/typed/formatted. I felt my life flashed before my eyes several times working on that (a few weeks ago).

I had to take 100 envelopes of certified mail to the post office. I took them an hour and a half to process all of the mail, shouts out to USPS.

Maybe not worst but interesting nonetheless. Associate pulled me into office and asked if I could look for the cheapest source of a specific model and year of a die-cast dump truck that would go on top of a deal toy. The truck had to be a part of the company's fleet, which was fairly limited (this was a utility servicing company). I could not find a cheaper truck anywhere (at least at the proper scale and from a reputable dealer) so I decided to call hobby stores directly to try to big-dick impromptu quantity discounts on the toy trucks (they are fairly expensive). Trying to explain the purpose of the trucks and the reason for needing so many to the owners was hilarious and I ended up getting the discounts. Definitely a fun day. Not sure if this is standard procedure or if the associate is just a quirky guy.

Finished work at 2.15am one day, have to be in the office at 8am the next morning cause another office is going to send some books to print and bind. Get there, wait a while until they actually send them. Turns out it's three books, 25 copies of each. Once I finish, I get a call saying to stop printing as they received further comments on two of the books. In the end, ended up printing and binding over 100 pitch books that morning.

Two stories:

1. VP e-mailed all the interns on Sunday at 22:00 asking who was in. None of us were in because we had an intern event that day, which he helped organize... We all reply from our homes that we aren't in, but could be at the office in X minutes if he really needs us. He replies to the first one of us who send the e-mail, who lives 40 minutes away even though some of us lived 5 min walk away. Guy travels to the office, while e-mailing what the assignment is. He gets a reply saying that he has to call when he is in the office. Once in, he calls and the VP tells him "Yeah, so I have tried to login from home, but it seems it is not working. Could you check if my PC is turned on?". Dude traveled 1,5 hours in total on his 'free' Sunday evening to turn on the PC of the VP, while there were enough people still in the office to do that.

2. VP asks on a Friday evening if the Analyst and I could please continue working on a deck and send it to his house the next morning before 10. All very important of course, because it was an important client and we had a strict deadline, so he wanted to give the comments at 12 so we could incorporate and send a revised version to the whole team at 2. While we didn't sleep for a week already we continued busting our balls, but at 3am the analyst tells me she needs to go home, because she has a church event tomorrow (on a Saturday?). So now I also have to finish her work. I finish at 6 am in the morning, book two cabs (home and pick-up in 2,5 hours) and book a courier for 9am. After 2 hours of sleep I come back and give the printout (not binded book, he didn't want that) to the courier. The analyst had asked me to incorporate all the comments, so now I wait. At 1 there is still no reply from the VP, also no response on e-mail and phone. At 5 he gives the feedback. The next day I ask why he wanted it printed and if he didn't have a printer at home. Turns out he went on a day out with his family and wanted to make the mark-up in the train. I had to courier the print to him, because he wasn't sure if he had enough ink in the printer left. Unfortunately he forgot to take the print with him in the train, so he could only make the mark up after he got home.

My friend's boss made my friend go sit in his car for an hour to avoid getting a parking ticket