Lifestyle

Worst intern ever! Employers dish on workers’ worst offenses

Summer intern season is winding down — and for every batch of impressive apprentices, one or two will always be remembered for all the wrong reasons. Here, three city employers share their tales of the clueless and borderline-crazy hopefuls who definitely won’t be getting full-time offers.

The Paris Hilton wannabe

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When Matthew Reischer hired two interns last summer, the CEO of the lawyer directory site LegalAdvice.com hoped they’d bring diligence and good judgment to the company’s One Penn Plaza office.

One of them — an eager college student recommended by a friend of a friend — brought a little something extra.

“[On] her first day of work, she showed up with her Chihuahua in a little carrier and just put him under her desk,” says Reischer, still incredulous. “I’m a dog lover, but this is a professional organization, and we work in a no-dog building.”

After a co-worker alerted Reischer to the presence of the uninvited canine, he immediately confronted the young woman, who explained she didn’t have anyone to watch her precious pooch. Reischer, in turn, sternly explained she was violating building policy.

“Then she actually got defensive and started giving me some degree of lip,” he says. “She couldn’t understand why I was making a big deal about such a small dog.”

Reischer was put off by her behavior, but thought the situation was handled — until the intern trotted into the office the next day with her little dog in tow.

“It was totally, totally, totally crazy,” says Reischer, who fired her on the spot. “We never heard from her again.”

The escape artist

Last summer, Abigail, a marketing executive at a major Midtown fashion house, thought an 18-year-old fashion student with “a seriously impressive resume” would be the perfect intern to help her team with archiving and research.

But the red flags started her first week on the job: Not only did the young woman show up wearing short, backless dresses and occasionally nap at her desk, but she started jetting out of the office early — if she even showed up at all.

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“Her reasons for missing work just got progressively weirder and weirder,” says Abigail, who prefers not to use her last name for professional reasons.

“One day it was because her roommate had fainted. The next week it was because she had fainted. Then, she called out because she said she had a hole in her apartment wall and was afraid the whole wall would crumble.”

Halfway through the paid internship, Abigail says she’d “already sat the girl down multiple times and explained I hadn’t missed this much work in my entire career.”

But a few days later, the intern delivered her most implausible excuse yet: She couldn’t come in because she had to attend the funeral of an aunt who was killed in a skateboarding accident on Long Island.

Suspicious, Abigail scoured the local news and obituaries and found nothing. But that afternoon, she got a surefire sign the excuse was baloney: The intern had posted a time-stamped Instagram picture of herself enjoying cocktails at a rooftop pool party.

Abigail handed the case over to HR, who “somehow bought the bogus story” and let her stay on.

“But at the end of the summer,” says Abigail, “you’d better believe I gave her a really horrible review.”

The litigious prankster

While scanning his inbox one day last March, Josh Knight got the scare of his life. The COO of EcoLogic Solutions, a Brooklyn Navy Yard-based manufacturer of environmentally sound cleaning products, came across an email with the following message: “My baby died when it fell in a bucket of your product, and I am going to sue!”

“It scared the pants off me,” Knight says of the message, which was sent through the company’s online contact form. “It’s the type of email you read and fear it could end your business in several words. I went through multiple different phases of fear in terms of liability.”

Panicked, Knight showed the shocking note to a co-worker, who immediately dispelled his fears: He’d overheard one of the company’s interns talking about the email hoax.

The culprit, a high school student who’d been assigned to the company through the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s internship program, ’fessed up as soon as Knight confronted him, and said he was only having “fun.”

“He apologized — but with a slight grin on his face,” says Knight. “He was that kid who’s always trying to push the envelope.”

After delivering a stern talking-to about “what the repercussions would be at a company that’s not as laid-back as ours,” Knight let the intern stay on for the duration of the spring program — with one caveat: “We had him doing the sweaty hard labor, like cleaning buckets,” says Knight. “He got the dirty jobs for the rest of the semester.”