The Intern Who Brought a Deck of Cards to Work

In July 2012, I wrote about an intern.

Not because the intern had written brilliant code.

Not because a difficult task had been solved.

Not because somebody had shown unusual professional discipline.

The intern had brought a deck of playing cards to work.

And instead of using the computer to play Solitaire, which would at least have looked like a conventional form of office boredom, the intern was using the physical cards to tell fortunes.

That was the scene.

I had already lowered my expectations.

I wrote that I did not expect much from an intern in terms of actual work.

I did not even insist that everything I asked be done.

That sounds harsh when read literally, but the real point was probably the opposite.

Interns are there partly to learn.

They are not experienced employees.

They do not yet know the organization, the work, the unwritten rules, or even what questions they should be asking.

So I was not expecting miracles.

But I did apparently have one remaining standard:

Please do not arrive at the workplace with a deck of cards and start fortune-telling.

That standard had felt reasonable.

Then the manager saw what was happening.

The manager did not say anything to the intern.

Instead, the manager came to me.

And I got the criticism.

That is where the story became memorable.

The cards were on the intern’s desk.

The fortune-telling belonged to the intern.

Somehow the responsibility had travelled across the room and found me.

Office life has a remarkable ability to reroute blame.

Organizational charts show who reports to whom.

Reality sometimes shows who gets shouted at.

Those diagrams are not always identical.

The old entry ends with a sentence I still like:

You have to choose interns the way you choose watermelons.

It is a ridiculous comparison.

That is why it works.

Watermelon selection has always had the air of folk science.

Look at the color.

Tap it.

Listen.

Check the stem.

Study the shape.

Everybody has a method.

Nobody seems completely certain.

Intern selection can feel similar.

A CV appears.

Grades.

Courses.

Maybe a short interview.

A few questions.

You try to infer what kind of person will arrive on Monday morning.

Will they ask questions?

Will they learn?

Will they disappear?

Will they sit quietly?

Will they surprise you?

Will they bring playing cards and start reading fortunes?

There is no checkbox for the last one.

This is one of the fundamental problems of hiring at every level.

Documents describe qualifications.

They do not fully describe behavior.

A transcript can tell you which courses someone passed.

It cannot tell you whether they will arrive with a deck of cards.

An interview can reveal something.

Not everything.

People are much larger than selection processes.

That is good for humanity and inconvenient for managers.

Internships make the mismatch particularly visible because young people often enter professional environments before learning the theater of professional environments.

Every workplace has a performance layer.

You are not only supposed to work.

You are supposed to look as though you understand what belongs there.

Certain objects belong.

Laptop.

Notebook.

Coffee.

Technical manual.

Certain behaviors belong.

Typing.

Reading.

Asking.

Waiting.

Certain behaviors immediately break the visual grammar.

Spreading playing cards on a desk and telling fortunes belongs strongly to that category.

Even if the workload is light.

Even if there is nothing urgent to do.

Even if nobody needs the intern for the next hour.

The image itself says:

I may have misunderstood the setting.

That is why Solitaire would have been less shocking.

Solitaire is also not work.

But Solitaire on an office computer is culturally recognized boredom.

It hides inside the machine.

A deck of cards transforms the desk.

Now the office briefly looks like somewhere else.

The difference is not productivity.

It is symbolism.

This is one reason workplaces care so much about appearances.

Sometimes excessively.

A person can waste an hour staring at a spreadsheet and look productive.

Another can finish everything quickly and then appear idle.

The first is often safer.

Visibility is dangerous.

The intern’s mistake may not have been wasting time.

The old entry does not even establish that any important task was being neglected.

The mistake was making non-work impossible to misinterpret.

There it was.

Physical evidence.

Cards.

Fortune.

No plausible explanation.

You could not say:

I was checking something.

The manager had eyes.

This should have made the situation easy.

Intern does strange thing.

Manager speaks to intern.

End.

Instead, the manager came to me.

That is the part that feels most like office life.

Responsibility often expands downward and sideways according to convenience.

You become responsible for people because you are near them.

Because you gave them a task once.

Because someone assumes you are supervising them.

Because you were the only experienced person in the room.

Because organizational responsibility is sometimes determined retrospectively.

Something happens.

Then everyone decides who should have prevented it.

That person discovers the role at the same time as the accusation.

Apparently, I had become responsible for preventing workplace fortune-telling.

A responsibility I had not known existed.

This is how job descriptions grow.

Not through formal revision.

Through incidents.

Yesterday:

engineer.

Today:

engineer plus intern behavior monitoring.

Tomorrow:

who knows.

The strange thing is that I was not even especially angry with the intern in the entry.

The sharper irritation is directed at the manager.

I had already accepted that the intern might not contribute much.

Fine.

But if the manager sees behavior the manager dislikes, why not address the person doing it?

That question is larger than this tiny story.

Good management requires dealing with the correct person.

It sounds obvious.

Yet organizations often prefer indirect correction.

Manager complains to team lead.

Team lead complains to senior employee.

Senior employee speaks to junior employee.

The original issue travels through three people and collects frustration on the way.

Everybody ends up annoyed.

Except perhaps the person who did the thing.

Direct communication would have been shorter.

But hierarchy sometimes treats information like a ceremonial object that must pass through approved hands.

This may protect structure.

It can also create absurdity.

By the time the message reaches the right person, it may no longer sound like:

Please do not tell fortunes at work.

It may sound like:

Management has concerns regarding professional conduct and workspace utilization.

Congratulations.

We have converted playing cards into bureaucracy.

The original event is better.

Simple.

Visible.

Funny.

That is why small workplace incidents survive better in memory than large project meetings.

Projects are complicated.

Stories prefer clean causality.

Intern brings cards.

Manager sees cards.

Manager yells at wrong person.

Excellent.

No PowerPoint required.

There is also something generous about remembering interns through mistakes.

Not because mistakes should define people.

Quite the opposite.

Internships exist partly because young people need a place to make low-cost professional mistakes.

Nobody enters work culture fully formed.

Some mistakes are technical.

Some social.

Some concern communication.

Some concern timing.

Some concern discovering that a workplace is not the ideal venue for fortune-telling.

That is education too.

Universities teach subjects.

Workplaces teach context.

Nobody needs a semester-long course called:

Appropriate Uses of Playing Cards in Professional Environments.

One awkward afternoon probably does the job faster.

The more experienced employee has mistakes too.

They are simply less picturesque.

Experienced people waste time professionally.

They know how.

They schedule meetings.

They write unnecessary email.

They open documents.

They look concerned.

Young people have not yet learned to camouflage boredom with enterprise software.

That may be one reason their mistakes feel more obvious.

There is innocence in bad office camouflage.

A deck of cards is refreshingly honest.

I am not working right now.

Here is physical proof.

Part of me respects the clarity.

Not enough to recommend it.

But enough to laugh.

The story also reminds me that mentoring is partly translation.

The intern does not only need technical instruction.

They need somebody to explain the invisible rules.

This matters.

Many workplace expectations are never written down because experienced people consider them obvious.

Do not disappear without telling anyone.

Ask before changing something important.

If you are blocked, say so.

Do not wait three days because you are afraid to ask a basic question.

Do not bring a deck of cards and start telling fortunes in full view of management.

The final rule feels obvious only after somebody violates it.

Every organization has hundreds of these invisible rules.

Newcomers learn them by observing reactions.

That is why the behavior of experienced people matters so much.

A workplace teaches continuously even when nobody is teaching deliberately.

What gets praised?

What gets ignored?

What gets punished?

Who gets blamed?

The intern learned something that day.

I learned something too.

Perhaps the lesson I learned was:

If an intern is attached to you in any visible way, you may eventually be blamed for objects they bring from home.

The old entry ends with watermelon selection because helplessness often turns into humor.

If you cannot control the system, make a joke about selection methodology.

Tap the intern before accepting them.

Listen carefully.

Is the sound hollow?

Check for playing cards.

Perfect.

Humor is one of the ways employees recover a little control over absurd workplaces.

You may not be able to redesign management.

But you can rename the experience.

Then it becomes a story instead of only irritation.

That transformation matters.

Work consumes too many hours of adult life to preserve only achievements.

We should also preserve nonsense.

The broken process.

The strange colleague.

The impossible customer.

The meeting that should have been an email.

The intern with the cards.

These details tell us what work actually felt like.

A CV says:

2012 — employed here.

Memory says:

One day the intern started telling fortunes with playing cards and somehow I was the one who got in trouble.

The second version is the one I would rather keep.

Because the first proves I worked there.

The second proves I was alive there.