Guess what happened after my long-winded rally cry for the
benefits of freelancing last week? I met with that editor from the fashion blog
and we laughed, swapped stories, drank water, and connected on all sorts of
levels and then the bomb dropped: All their freelancers are unpaid.
Story of our lives, right? I mean, I’m definitely still
taking the job anyways, but I guess money doesn’t start raining down once you
upgrade from “intern” to “freelancer.” Oh well, I live and I learn.
But that is not the point of this post. The point of this
post is that I’ve made some TERRIBLE mistakes at all of my internships and
since we’re all rounding the halfway mark in the summer, that usually means the
first (or, who am I kidding, the first ten) big uh-oh mistakes have happened at our prestigious places of work.
There are different levels to these transgressions. There’s
the funny type, which aren’t so bad. Example: A girl at one of my fashion
closet internships took a $40 pedi-cab ride back to the office after one of her
first messenger runs because she was having trouble hailing a taxi.
Then there’s the are-they-going-to-fire-me
type of mistakes. Recently, I reported on a fancy, celebrity-filled panel for a
post at my internship, and I mis-quoted the founder of one of the brands
represented. There’s nothing like getting a ‘Hey! You messed up!’ email from
the PR director of the well-recognized women’s magazine that hosted the event
at 9:30 pm on the day the post was published.
