Unfriendly interns and our office men

These days girls are too sharp. Imagine they brought us new interns this year but if you did not have “manager” or “director” in your title, you were nothing more than part of the furniture. After the human resource manager had introduced the group of four girls and four men to the staff, she assigned them supervisors and left them in the hands of their new masters – or so the supervisors thought.
I did not get any interns this time round, and I felt very left out. I would not have minions to do my work for me for free, I would have to borrow favours. But later, I learned that I had in fact survived because this particular group of interns had become “unmanageable”, especially the girls.

At first, it did not click until the assistant human resource manager broke it down for me during lunch break, about four days later. Laughing out loud, she asked the men how the interns were performing. But none of them wanted to talk about them.
I got curious and pressed her to explain. Clearly pleased with the situation, she told me the girls were not impressed by their supervisors at all. They had figured out that the impressive sound job titles they carried were nothing more than just that; empty job titles. And so, they were doing their minimal duty expected of them, but were not bending backwards to please the poor ‘supervisors’, pun intended. They knew who held the power to hire and fire.

Apparently, at first, it had not been that obvious. The intern supervisors had initially wondered why this year’s interns were not very friendly, tending towards even coldness. After a while, they had even stopped trying to ask them to join them for drinks because the girls made it clear they were not interested.
Since it was not part of the work schedule, they could not be forced. I remembered asking one of the men to invite his interns to join us, and shaking his head he had simply walked away from me.
Now it made some sense. But why were the interns that anti-social, I wondered. Again, it was the assistant human resource manager who cleared it for me. She told me they were indeed quite friendly, if you were of the right rank.

Seeing as I was confused, she explained that the interns were very polite and gentle with senior-level managers upwards. She even told me that just the previous day, one of the senior managers had taken the girls out for drinks and they had had a great time.
I saw my friend’s face darken because he had been asking the same girls to join him for drinks, coffee, juice anything for more than a week without success.
And he had all along thought that the girls were just anti-social, or simply not interested in outings, or him. It turned out they were not interested in him, because of his low level job.
And now here he was, hearing that the girls were indeed quite social. And it was not about the money, because there was no way those girls could have figured out how much their supervisors earned. It was all about despising people’s positions.

My friend did not take it well. The next day, he gathered his team of interns, and told them that he will not have any fraternisation in his team.
He hoped to confuse them, hoping they would not figure out that fraternising was different from socialising. But they were smart people.
They immediately reported him to his manager, who sent him a strongly worded Email and immediately relieved him of his supervisory role. The interns now report directly to the manager. And the one he had his eye on, the pretty one with long hair was seen leaving with Mr Senior Manager yesterday evening. It is a tough world.