Not even the chocolate kind

This summer I'm interning for the Corporate Communications team at Turner Broadcasting. It's very neat. I get to work in the CNN Center and do the behind-the-scenes work for the internal and external Turner websites.

So I'm learning a ton of new things. Mostly how to master all things Adobe (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator), but also some life lessons.

As a precursor, I really like this internship. Mostly because they let me learn whatever I want in my free time and they encourage me to seek out anything I'm interested in. But in an effort to translate the general experience of this internship, I offer you this metaphor that I have come to quote painfully often:

There was a guy who wanted to be a master chef. So he went to apprentice in some great kitchen where he could practice his wonderful chef skills. The head chef told him that he had to thinly slice hundreds of potatoes into very skinny wafers. The man spent days and days slicing the potatoes just so, and when the head chef saw that he had finished, he threw all the potato slices in the trash.

The apprentice asked why he would do that when he had spent days slicing them perfectly. And the head chef said, "Because you'll actually be slicing these," presenting him with truffles (you know, the really expensive ones that pigs dig up).

And so, if you're catching my drift, I've been slicing potatoes. But hey, I'm learning how to slice correctly, and I intend to be the best slicer ever by the time I'm handed truffles.