Last Wednesday, operations at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra came to a standstill for upwards of 3 hours. I was the first person in the PR office that morning, and after I had boot-up my computer, I came face-to-face with the worst nightmare of Americans born after 1983: No Internet. When the PR & Publications Coordinator came in, her computer was experiencing the same problems. No e-mail. No web. And limited access to shared files. She was unable to e-mail final drafts to the printers, and I couldn't access the hyperlinks on my Google Alerts. So what did we do? We started cleaning our desks. Ever since I got to the BSO, there had been a giant stack of papers on my desk -manila folders, glossy tri-fold publications from seasons long ago, and a ton of copies- which like the cranky cat of a deceased aunt, I had inherited but didn't want to claim. But since my desk is the size of a Monopoly board, and the stack of papers were occupying Park Place through Reading Railroad, I couldn't very well continue to ignore it. The contents were as follows:
1) Approximately 80 sheets of blank printer paper. Since I only have 3 more pieces of paper in the notebook I found on the intern desk, and I don't know if I'm going to be allowed to have another notebook when this one is gone, I decided to hide the blank paper in one of the manila folders. It's kind of like when a dog's owner doesn't come home for a day, so the dog only eats a few bites of the food in his dog bowl, because he can't be sure of when his owner will return. I'm rationing my office supplies, because I don't know if they're going to give me anymore when I run out.
2) Mailers from the 2010-2011 Seasons. I decided to keep these just in case I needed to reference past concerts.
3) A bunch of black & white xerox copies of articles about the BSO from 2010. PR people are always supposed to have these on-hand for when other people say, "What does PR even do?" and start talking smack, then we're like, "Well, just a little bit of full-color, feature coverage in the Washington Post with a circulation of half a million people stuff like that." But these articles are old news, and I wanted to put them in recycling, but the PR Coordinator wouldn't let me. I guess I'm supposed to cremate them or something.
4) Lastly, I stumbled upon a cemetery of edited press releases from past interns. There seemed to be hundreds of them, covered in red ink. Some of them were marred beyond recognition, and stained with the hot, painful tears of a once optimistic young student whose dreams of career and success were massacred with an ink pen and a New York Times Style Guide. Okay, that last part was complete falsehood, but I couldn't resist. Nevertheless, I studied over those drafts as if conducting an autopsy, so that I could avoid making those same mistakes: not bsomusic.org, BSOmusic.org; no comma before 'and' in a list; proofread artists' biographies; and above all, be informative and newsworthy, don't be a salesman.
And then I threw all those press releases of past interns in a communal burial called the recycle bin. I'm not heartless, I just don't have room for crud like that on my desk. Did I mention that my desk is the size of an airplane tray table?
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