3 Intern Architect Positions In a Year

invalid submitted 300 days ago

When I graduated school I was so under qualified to work that it took me over 5 years to get a job as an intern where a friend of mine from school convinced his boss to hire me.

Unfortunately, not only did I not know how their software worked, nor did I have any feel for what information was expected to be seen in the drawings, my boss was also one of the most heartless, impatient, angry, and mean people I have ever encountered. After my initial attempt to perform my duties obviously disappointed him thoroughly he thought it would be appropriate to discuss with me at length, during a couple of half-hour long, rather one-sided conversations, in which he questioned my intentions, my talent, and my intellect I told him that he was verbally abusive one morning after the echoes of his dark, intimidating voice had kept me up all night.

I knew immediately that my request not to be berated for doing my best marked me for eventual termination. It was clear that my use of the word "abuse" embarrassed him, in fact he coward when I said it, but really all it did was anger him even more, as his attempt to bully me was met with resistance, leaving him without control. So he waited a month, or so, building up anger, getting upset at little things, etc. Until one day he said definitively, that I had intentionally mis-titled a drawing. I had put an "x" in the title to notify him that I didn't know what he wanted to name it. And that was it, I was gone.

It only took a month to find another job at a seemingly better firm. Actually, I was quite excited to learn this new place would soon be installing a large solar array on the roof of the office building to generate electricity. It was to my dismay that I was mistakenly led into thinking that an architecture firm that was going to install a $100,000 solar array on the roof might have some interest in convincing its clients that they too should consider sustainable design, perhaps by calculating the energy consumption of the building to design the most energy efficient mechanical system. I was soon to discover that, not only are most corporate hotel chains designed purely for the least cost of the equipment and not for the energy consumption of the buildings...even the "prototypical" models for the hotels we were designing had taken no energy consumption guidelines into account upon the date it would be released for investors to bid.

Unfortunately, this firm's idea of a prototype is all too indicative of American Innovation in the 21st century. Basically, the innovation is in the lie.

Upon my disappointing discovery that, not only were my colleagues not designing buildings to be as good as they should for the environment or even as economically as they could be for the owner/operator, but they were also disguising their outdated, unsustainable, predatory, and parasitic methods by gathering on-lookers' attentions toward the huge solar array that they had put on top of their roof, which, it turns out, is not an expression of an interest in sustainable design, but rather, is the owner's son's science experiment, permitted and protected by daddy, just so that his son has something to go look at in between answering the phone hardly ever and not showing up to work as the "downstairs receptionist".

Okay, so, I didn't belong there either.

It only took a couple of weeks to find another potential employer, who was working on public housing. I thought that working on something with social significance might suit me. At first I thought everything was great: The guy who hired me had been a teacher at the university, he was personable and had a sense of humor. I was determined to do well, after all even my stubborn self was willing to stop asking questions long enough to just take a paycheck. I bought an extra computer so that I could draft at home. I worked more than I had worked at the other two jobs. I stayed on task all the time, no energy consumption guideline tangents. This time the project was more interesting to me because it was a local site and I felt my part in the flow in the design process between the client and the architect.

So how could such an ideal situation go wrong?

When my boss placed his bid on the project, he was just bullshitting. When he won the bid he was an architect with a partner, a long-time employee, and an intern who was ready to take a break and move on. He had only just a couple of his own employees, and he hired contractors to do much of the work on the drawings. Where he screwed up, I think, is that he hired a consultant to do drawings, then he hired me to do the same work, but because the consultant had more experience, he considered himself to be my boss, when, in fact, it was more important for me, actually working in the architect's office, to manage all of the information we were having other people produce.

I met this consultant after a few days of work. He seemed pleasant, but I couldn't help but wonder about how I might interact with him when he asked our boss on the way to a site visit, "I am designing a fence that will have a roof on it. Should the fence be vented if it has a roof?"

He said he had ten years of experience. I tried to think nothing of it. Actually, I thought, "If a guy with 10 years of experience feels comfortable asking whether or not to vent a fence, then I should be just fine asking any of my sure-to-be-silly-sounding questions whenever."

Again we were to go on another site visit, just he and I. We were going to carpool, but he changed plans at the last second, because he said he wanted to go to shopping at IKEA: I thought it was a strange request. When we got to the site I had some rooms I needed to measure and photograph, which I had told him before going, but for some reason he discouraged me when I asked the maintenance staff for access. Although I helped him do his measurements, every picture I took, every room I looked it, he indicated his suspicion of what I was doing. I tried not to think about it, again, I thought I must be overly sensitive to him.

His tone of voice really bothered me, I couldn't stop talking about it with my wife that night.

I had decided that if he was going to continue talking to me, not letting me do my job I would have to confront him, so at least he would know I was bothered by it. Sure enough, a couple of days later he comes into the office and starts telling me what I should be working on at that particular moment. He had no idea what files I had already been working on or what conversations I had with our boss, he wanted to see me work on this one particular file NOW.

That was it, I told him he we would need to clear the air. Another coworker was there to observe our conversation, but I am sure he did not see things the same way I did. I told Mr. IKEA that he had offended me previously, and that I would not take any further direction from such a bully.
Although my attitude was pissing him off, I thought I was being nice as long as I didn't mention that he was so determined to go shopping at IKEA for his lunch break. Well, I gave him chance after chance to apologize and promise to give me space, but he insisted that he was the one who was on task, and that I wasn't. That's when I told everyone that he wanted to go shopping at IKEA.

He said his boss trusts him to go shopping during site visits. I didn't have presence of mind to ask my boss if he trusts Mr. Ikea to go shopping at Ikea when Mr. Ikea is working for him.

Well, that situation wasn't good, but I didn't get fired right away. First, my real boss left for vacation for three weeks. There I was, working with the guy who pissed me off, and the other guy who thought I should just accept his comments. At some point Mr. IKEA, my new full-on boss, whose direction I must follow, who doesn't even work in my office, had made comments to me about the organization of the folders in our project directory and how he thought they should be organized. He also later asked me why I hadn't changed the files yet. So, I changed the files according to his preference, and when he discovered what I had done, he insisted he had not told me to do it.

I told him he was too busy polishing his managerial name tag to notice any changes in the project, and that I was open to feedback as long as he could improve on what I had done, but that if he can't admit that he asked for it, and that it was done correctly, then it's impossible for me to do my job.

Then he wrote a message to my boss and to his boss, but not to me, about me, that complained that I did not say, "Hello, Mr. Ikea, How are you?" when he had graced me with his presence.

When my boss came back to work, he said I would have to fix the problem. I wrote a quite convincing apology letter, but I was fired anyway. Although, at least this time I got 2 weeks severance pay. Then Mr. Ikea decided he would continue to write me, and in that note he promised to keep writing me. I am not kidding. I forwarded Mr. Ikea's last message to my now former boss, and I haven't heard from Mr. Ikea since.