perspective
When I did my school work experience, as far as I know, nobody in my year got their first choice of placement unless their first choice was "working at the company my daddy owns". I think this taught us a valuable lesson about the real world.

Several years on, and I found myself landed with not one, but six work-experience people, all at once, on my own, and with about ten minutes warning via the age-old method of a post-it-note on my desk when I arrived in the morning. They were doing an admin qualification through one of our delivery partners and my boss was in one of those "can't say no" situations.

Trouble was they all had a checklist of things they had to do, half of which weren't things we ever actually DID. Like "sending and receiving faxes, observing the necessary procedures". Procedure number one, finding something harmless to keep all six of them occupied in an office that gets crowded with four people in it, while Batsgirl tries to find the dusty instruction manual for the equally dusty fax machine which has neither sent nor recieved a fax in the entirety of her period of employment...

My masterpiece was probably "You see this blank form? This is the format in which we collect client information. We're trying to get computerised (like hell we were, confidentiality meant no recognisable client data on the computers). So using this as a guide, can you hop onto Word and create some blank files for future clients on these diskettes?"
( Batsgirl, Wed 16 May 2007, 14:53, Reply)