intern invasion

today i overheard this lady standing in the middle of the cafeteria trying to look for a table say, "the cafeteria's been invaded by interns!" with the such bitterness and disgust. i thought it was pretty funny.

i don't remember if i ever talked about the cafeteria system at the UN. but it's pretty much like the first day of school. you know the freshmen (interns/noobs) bunch together on one long-ass table. the more senior you get, the less number of people you have in a group sitting together. it's coz the more senior you get, the more comfortable you are just sitting alone. the fear sort of wears out after a while. and you realize, it's no big deal.

today, i was trying to eavesdrop on different conversations in the cafeteria. of course you had the more senior people talking about the recently closed meeting on disarmament or the budget for upcoming projects. then you have the slightly younger crowd who volley back and forth between work issues and what happened over the weekend. then you have the interns (who by this time, i noticed, occupied at least two-thirds of the cafeteria) who can be broken down into two different categories: the college idealists and the high school babies.

the college interns tend to talk about their fascination with being assigned to work with so-and-so ambassador, or sitting in on one of the major meetings ongoing in the basement conference rooms. it's amusing and annoying at the same time. and it's really funny that i'm annoyed because i was once one of those interns. at least, i had that same fascination once. but you slowly learn that it's not all that presitigious after all.

and then there are the high school babies. and as far as babies go, they can either be so adorable in their suits and well-groomed hair (that you just know their mommies made sure of preparing :-p) or completely annoying. maybe even more annoying than the college interns because some of them walk around in the crisp suits that mommy ironed, walking tall and with chests donning the UN ID out, and you just feel a lil bit of arrogance in their walk. like, "yeah, i'm younger than all of you, and i'm here!" to a certain extent, it's annoying. but sometimes you can't help but laugh once you hear their conversations in the cafeteria revolve around miley cyrus, pokemon, and wrestlemania (or some wrestling federation like that).

definitely makes lunch a lot more interesting than it was 3 years ago.