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They were the only three girls in the intern cohort of 27. (Well, they weren’t, but one girl dropped the first week to focus on her summer classes, and another two were based in other offices after training ended, so they didn’t count.) It made sense, then, that they had fallen into the habit of eating together on days they were forced to be in the office.
Dorothea wiggled a flimsy plastic fork into a salad from CVS. Wordlessly, she passed the white plastic spoon that came in the pack with the fork over to Leonie. They had worked out a system for it by now, so that nothing went to waste. Leonie had bought a cup of soup. The middle of summer may be too hot for soup, but it was the dead cheapest meal around. It even came with a free bread roll. As someone who did not need to consume as much as Ingrid did, this helped her spend less, week to week. Ingrid tucked into a pasta plate from the office building’s own cafetera, which she proudly insisted was the best deal around town - the highest volume of food for your dollars.
Maybe she was on to something? If you could store the leftovers, it would be cheaper. Cheapest of all would be cooking, but though she could cook passably well, Leonie frequented fast food when she was near campus. The dorm kitchens were being remodeled over the summer, rendering them completely unusable.
“So,” said Dorothea, “would either of you mind adding me on social media? I’d very much like to stay in touch with you lovely ladies but I’m dropping this dreadful internship in the fall.”
“ What ?” Leonie said, as Ingrid missed her mouth and hit her own nose with a forkful of zucchini in surprise. “You’re quitting? Just like that? Why?”
Dorothea laughed, a sound like bells, as she dug her fork into the iceberg lettuce a little cruelly.
“This is hardly an internship, my dear, you have to agree.”
“Huh,” said Ingrid, wiping marinara off her face.
Internally, Leonie agreed. What could be more real of an internship than this? Hell, it was better than some actual jobs she’d had. Everything was above board, they filled out forms… she wore a (rumpled) suit and took the train (an hour) to the office… there was even a modest stipend, which helped to pay for Leonie’s daily cup of soup.
“Well, we’re not here to learn a trade, it seems,” explained Dorothea.
Ingrid frowned. “The summer started out with three weeks of licensing courses, which the company paid for.”
“Ass-covering legal move,” Dorothea said, waving one elegant hand. “They don’t expect us to be workers. We’re here to funnel in prospective customers for the people we’re supposed to be shadowing. I mean, how long have we been here? Why have they retained us all this long if we haven’t made any sales?”
Leonie knit her brows together as Ingrid gave a small, relieved sigh. “You haven’t made any sales either? I was worried it was just… just me.”
Though she was still thinking, Leonie spoke up, honest to a fault. “I’ve barely even gotten any initial meetings.”
“Mmh, initial meetings don’t go very far once they figure out it’s for real money and not just a toothless intern practicing alone - you know, the way they told us to package ourselves to get in the door? I’m going to end up burning through the goodwill of my university’s choir alumni by the end of summer at this rate,” said Dorothea.
“Oh,” said Ingrid softly.
“Shit,” Leonie said, “it’s smart to go through an alumni group like that, though.” She had been cold calling her own university alumni all summer as well, but they were basically strangers. She could be at a cubicle in a headset selling herbal remedies for all the connection she was able to leverage.
“I’ve been trying to get in with my father’s friends, but…” Ingrid trailed off, staring at her plate mournfully. (Because her mind was elsewhere? Or because it was empty now?)
Leonie and Dorothea were both, privately, stabbed with envy at this. Ingrid’s family wasn’t rich, that much was evident from how she scrimped on meals like she was truly one of them, but the family was old, local to the area and connected. It was a base of “prospects” that neither of them could dream of.
“I don’t… think they trust that I’m going to stick with this. They’d rather stay with old family financial advisors than some girl who’s just playing at a career,” Ingrid almost whispered.
“You can’t get a family friend to just wave a hand and move some money around?” asked Dorothea, in the closest thing to a derisive tone Leonie had ever heard her level at another girl. She sounded downright cold, if Leonie didn’t know better… then again, Leonie didn’t consider herself that good at reading emotions.
Despite dwelling on her iniquities as a salesman, Ingrid seemed affronted by the idea. “They told us specifically not to do that! That’s unethical, Dorothea!”
“We’d lose these licenses,” added Leonie, sounding surprisingly levelheaded against Ingrid’s hissing and spluttering. Leonie supposed it was a relief to not have to worry about conflict of interest due to not having family friends; still, it was unlikely to outweigh the benefit of having capital-c Connections at all.
Bitterly, Dorothea said, “That’s how things get done around here anyway and you both know it. ‘Get us in front of a client and we’ll probably find a need,’ they said. We’re just here to load up their funnel.”
Ingrid looked wounded. “...Catherine wouldn’t do that to us.” She really admired her mentor for the program, one of the few women on the sales staff instead of shunted into a back-office role with no chance to win glory or commission.
“Alois has been nice. He’s a little much, but he doesn’t seem like the type to take advantage.” Leonie’s mentor was a boisterous, excitable man with a little daughter at home. She liked working with him.
“Yes, your mentors would never do that to you,” drawled Dorothea. “But can you say the same for Seiros Financial Advisors? The company?”
And the three girls went quiet, losing hope, as they each drew the conclusion they could not.
The silence was broken by Leonie’s snort. “Well, that can’t be all true. I’ve got nobody useful to connect to. They really fucked up hiring me, in that case.”
Leonie was… Leonie was a little bit special, in that regard. They couldn’t have known how many wealthy connections she didn’t-have beforehand, but she wasn’t headhunted for that. Or for anything; she’d just been persistent with the recruiter. She wanted to work at this company ever since… ever since she’d read about one of its agents who’d made an investment call so good for his clients, papers were written about it. No collusion. Intuition. Talent. Trust. She’d even picked her university because his daughter taught economics there. Right; if anything, Leonie’s connections were on the back end, to the staff here, but while it helped her get hired, it bore no relation to closing a sale.
“Well,” said Ingrid resignedly, “if it makes you feel any better, connections don’t do you any good when you share all of them with a couple of boys doing the same internship as you, and you’re unlikeable.”
“Sylvain and Felix are buffoons, and how could anyone not like you?” said Dorothea, simultaneous to Leonie’s groan.
“Oh, don’t remind me, that’s another thing, I’m ‘unlikeable’ too,” she said. “I thought I could power through and be successful in this internship with hard work, but apparently you need to be likeable? Who knew,” Leonie ended on a laugh.
“Dorothea, how does it feel to be charming?”
Dorothea smiled. “Like shit.”
“Oh.” said Leonie. “Wow.”
“If I wanted to be paid to smile at wealthy people, I’d sell pics, not some garbage financial product for a company that’s less likely to give you your money back in a disaster than a shoebox under your mattress.”
Yikes . Leonie made a face, but said nothing.
“That’s not fair,” said Ingrid, “plenty of people use and need insurance…”
Dorothea leveled another stare at her, the kind without her usual friendliness. Leonie gave Ingrid a look too, like she was ready to fight. Dorothea caught this, and slightly moved her head, signaling let me handle this .
“They… well, they can’t be without it in the current system, then their bills wouldn’t be covered at all.”
“Oh Ingrid, you’re so close. You’ll get there soon, sweetheart.” Ingrid did not like the tone this took, but, being the youngest of the bunch, remained quiet.
Leonie did not have this problem with seniority. “It sounds like you don’t want this industry to exist, Dorothea.”
“All we’d accomplish if we made any actual sales is help fancy old rich people dodge taxes, what are you defending them for?”
“Dunno what’s going on in your neck of the woods, but the tax system in County Gloucester hasn’t exactly done poor people any favors either.”
“This is a scam.” Dorothea looked cross now. “Listen, you two can not grind your way through this company on hard work alone. They won’t reward that.”
“By Indech’s shit, then, Dorothea, why did you even join it?”
“The same reason you did,” said Dorothea, helplessly. “When I am old, I will need money, and I heard that to get money, you have to be one of the people who manages money for someone even richer. But that’s not what we’re doing here. Just… trust me when I say it. I know we’re being taken advantage of.”
Leonie dipped her free bread roll into her soup, announcing a moment of peace for them all to reconsider the internship as a whole. Dorothea appeared to have placated Ingrid by sliding her the scoop of tuna that came with her salad (“I thought it was gonna be egg. Can’t stand this stuff.”)
A faint, rhythmic buzzing began nearby.
“Do you hear that?”
“Oh- oh shoot!” said Ingrid. She pulled a phone out from the depths of her bag (brand name leather tote; this did not escape the other girls’ notice) and the full force BZZT BZZT accompanied by Taylor Swift’s Fearless was released into the thick midday air.
“This is my alarm for when lunch is over,” she explained. “We have to go back to our desks now so they’ll see we’re still working.”
“Eh,” said Dorothea. “I’m not finished here yet.”
“We could be doing calls from anywhere,” added Leonie. This was part of why she had downgraded her train pass from the exorbitant full month unlimited rides to a pay-per-trip model; after training, she didn’t need to be in office to show she was putting in hours. “Weekly meeting’s over, so going back upstairs just shows them we didn’t get any in-persons on our calendar again.”
“We still work here…”
“Ingrid, come on, we just went over this,” said Dorothea. “We can run a few minutes late.”
Ingrid twisted her mouth. “I miss the air conditioning.”
Leonie became conscious at that moment of the sun’s bright glare off the inexplicably uncomfortable metallic picnic tables in the courtyard. She laughed. Free air conditioning!
“Coming?”
Dorothea groaned for effect. “Help me up,” she said.
Their shoes made a racket on the hot slate stones as they walked back to the glass office tower where they worked. (Mostly Dorothea’s shoes; Ingrid’s boots gave more of a clunk and Leonie had found off-brand boat shoes with almost sneakerlike rubber soles.) Dorothea straightened her skirt in the mirrored surface of the building as Leonie keyed them all in.
“You know, real networking isn’t about calling up these strangers to pitch them things,” Dorothea said. She was still fussing with her hair as they all stepped into the elevator. “It’s about spending a lot of time working with people you trust. Now to that end: would either of you like to add me on any social site that
isn’t
LinkedIn?”