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Patton.
    “Twenty-five of you stand before me today—which is a world record for consecutive shit stains.”
    He walks along the wall we are all standing in front of like firing squad victims, inspecting the ranks.
    “I see there’s still no shortage of lazy white people in the world.”
    He stops at the Asian woman.
    “Do you speak English?”
    “Yes,” she says, too afraid to be pissed off by the racist question.
    “Good. Then you’re already ahead of the curve.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Shut up. Here you speak when you are spoken to. You listen and take notes. No one cares about your opinion. No one cares what you think about anything. You are a fly on the wall, and if I hear you buzzing, I will swat you with yesterday’s news.”
    He stops and looks at me, sizing me up. I look past him, not down like the others. Looking down means you are feigning subservience, and this guy knows we are all a bunch of egomaniacal assholes. So, I don’t disrespect him by looking him in the eye and I don’t call attention to myself by pretending to be afraid of him.
    “Military?”
    “No, sir.”
    He scowls. Whatever he thought was special about me just flew out the window. His contempt quickly turns to beautiful indifference. In his mind, I am already lower than the wad of gum full of cockroach eggs wedged next to his heel.
    “Three of you will actually be interns at Bendini, Lambert and Locke when it’s all said and done. The rest will be cleaned off my shoe by the African American gentleman with the shine box at the end of the block.”
    I’m fucked. Either Bob was unaware that intern boot camp was part of the program here or, more realistically, he knew about it and kept his mouth shut to get back at me for my “attitude.” Either way, I’m in deep shit. I know a lot about the law, but these people are Ivy League law school graduates. They are probably smarter than most of the fucking associates already working at the firm. And ambitious? Forget about it. They would sell their parents to a zombie slaughterhouse if they thought it could get them a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg.
    For a brief moment, I think about killing them one by one toget my own leg up. But even though HR, Inc. condones “collateral damage” if it ensures a kill, that is something I have worked hard to avoid over the years. How would you like to be going about your business, busting your ass to pay the bills and take your kids to Disney on Ice, and have some dick like me put a bullet in your head? Not cool. Not cool at all. So, I have to suck it up. And that’s exactly what Bob will tell me later when I casually remark that the intel had not included information about me being a character in a Mike Judge remake of Lord of the Flies .
    “You will each be randomly assigned to different departments. And you will work like you’ve never worked in your life. You will not sleep. You will barely eat. And don’t be surprised if the gallons of rotgut coffee you drink make you piss blood for a week. I will weed out all nonhackers in my beloved intern corps. Do you understand me, maggots?”
    “Yes, sir!” we all bellow.
    “Good. Now get to work or I will eat your balls and shit out what family you have left. And if you don’t have balls, you might as well start picking out your Starbucks apron.”
    After all of the good assignments are passed out, I get the “let’s put the hick in the basement” assignment. If this were a first-person shooter, I’d be standing buck naked on level one with a ball-peen hammer to defend myself against cyborgs bristling with exotic weaponry. I have to find a way out of this shit detail as soon as humanly fucking possible if I’m going to have a shot at this.
    Then light dawns on Marblehead and I remember my latest trip on the Bullshit Express the other night. Over stiff pours of Kentucky’s finest paint thinner I met Alice, an intern who’d been working for the firm for nearly a year. She’s pretty, ambitious (but