By Katherine Waters
Sun Staff Intern
NORWICH – In my almost three-month stay at The Evening Sun, I have not been asked to do any embarrassing tasks as an intern. In fact, I didn’t even fetch the coffee until the opening of Dunkin’ Donuts when I was there at 5 a.m. I thought to myself that this must be the best internship ever. I’m allowed to write about what I want. They trust me to make phone calls and do interviews, and they even liked my “Punching the Clock” article. I thought I had it made, until the fair waltzed in to town and I was lucky enough to be assigned a task with Sun Staff Writer Jessica Lewis.
Now granted, at the age of 20 some may say my work experience is limited. Even so, I do not think it is normal for your boss to hand you a 20 dollar bill and assign you to spend it at the fair. The task was to be able to do as much as possible without going over $20 between Jessica and I. This was obviously going to be fun.
For $20, we wanted to have lunch, ride a ride, play a game (Jessica wanted to win a gold fish), have dessert and leave satisfied that we had participated in one of Chenango County’s largest events.
We decided first to explore the things we could do for free. We wandered through the exhibition hall and out to the 4-H section where we saw the bovine competition take place. Their heads were nice to look at, but the judge was looking at the other end. I don’t know why.
The real fun, for Jessica, started when we made our way to the kids corner where they had a stick-horse obstacle course. Jessica asked me to run through it as fulfillment of my interning duties. It would have been fine if a little girl hadn’t asked me to run through it five more times, while Jessica stood nearby taking pictures.
Afterwards at the free petting zoo, Jessica decided she wanted a picture of me petting the pig instead. By the time I got to the place she wanted me, near the pig’s head, it turned around and laid down with its rear end facing me.
But this did not deter my supervisor; she still wanted my picture and told me to touch its rump. As any good intern would, I complied with her wishes.
Thankfully there were no more little “tasks” to do at the fair, and we enjoyed our time having lunch and giggling like school girls on the Gravitron. We couldn’t stand straight afterwards for a good 10 minutes. We attempted to win a gold fish at the ping pong game, but failed miserably. I think we were still motion sick from the ride.
The rest of the afternoon passed watching the free tractor pull competition in the grandstand. This to my surprise was an entertaining sport. It was made even more interesting when one tractor decided to lose its wheel while pulling the weights.
When the day was through, we had one out of our $20 left and we decided to test our luck one more time with the ping pong game, and because I am an “intern extraordinaire,” I won Jessica her gold fish. We’ve named him Sunny. He is now the office mascot.
In all fairness, the events at the fair were all fun and games. No one got hurt, and I am glad to fulfill my duties as intern at The Evening Sun (as long as I don’t find one of those pictures on the front page).