She brought the rope. . .

I just held on to it.

Today, I let someone dangle before dropping my end of the rope. I don't truly have a justification, other than she hit my pet peeve. Actually, a couple of them.

I got a call this afternoon from a young woman who only identified herself as a student at a distant university. I thought perhaps she was conducting research, so I wasn't immediately dismissive. She explained that she was interested in interning for my company. Her identified major isn't one we normally attract in our line of business, so I asked her if she understood what we do? She said that she did because she'd visited a similar company where she is located.

Okay. Still, she hasn't given me her name. This annoys me. Really annoys me.

I asked about what sort of internship project she envisioned, being not the traditional sort of major we attract. She then read to me the handout she had on the requirements of the internship . . . the number of hours, the need to be supervised, the need to have site visits, etc . . . still nothing on what sort of project she would perform.

I went at it from another angle. She still didn't tell me her name, or seem to understand what I was looking for.

I asked her how many hours she would need and what semester she was thinking of doing this internship. She said she would need to work full time in our office starting in a month and that she expected to work from her distant city and be online most of the time and come once or twice to the office.

Um, no.

I take supervising interns pretty seriously. I want to know that when they put my company on their resumes, other companies will respect the skills we helped develop. Also, this is the opportunity to get exposed to many facets of the job . . . not just the academic side of the discipline.

And, I've never employed anyone who wouldn't tell me their frickin' name.

Post-Script from 4/13/11: Today, a man and a little boy came by the office with a basket of homemade cookies. The little boy was dressed in his Sunday best and had a great little speech . . . starting with telling me his name. I bought two baggies of cookies. The Spider Monkeys were agog with the fact I didn't tell the kid to "beat it."