Being asked for professional favour by a total stranger

[LavenderHills]

I work as an advisor for a fairly high-profile MP. Last night I met a close friend for a drink and she had another friend with her, who I had never met before. The drink was a last-minute thing and I knew she had the friend with her, so no problem. We're all having a nice chat and then the other friend, out of nowhere, asks me if I could organise an internship with my boss for her uni student DD. I felt uncomfortable having been asked this by a total stranger, but politely explained that we don't take interns and never have. She wouldn't take no for an answer, and kept saying "All I'm hearing is that you've never had interns before now. Surely you could make it happen?" When I tried to change the subject, she said "Look how she's trying to avoid the question!" I shut it down and ended up leaving early as I felt really awkward. AIBU for being annoyed at my friend for putting me in that position? I don't think she organised it on purpose and I know she can't control the behaviour of her friend, but she could have backed me up when I was saying no and trying to change the subject!

Flabbergasted that some people think the initial request wasn't rude.

Social occasion when you've gone to wind down from what I assume is a hard job and you just get an hour of a random stranger whining incessantly that you should favour their spawn for a position that doesn't exist

Your friend should have invented a period emergency and either apologised profusely to you or taken the other woman to one side and told her to wind her neck in.

The MOST she should've asked is if it would be the done thing for her DC to send a CV in for whatever roles are actually available

I'm imagining the poor daughter when she hears about this. I would have cringed myself inside out if my parents had tried to get a job for me.
My oldest son recently started looking for work and his father and I both gave him advice about where to go, who to speak to etc, but that's all. Apparently parents trying to interfere and run their children's work lives for them is a huge problem- a friend who is a foreman at a salmon farm recently gave an interview to a lad who seemed okay but nothing special and he had other people to see, so he said that he would let him know. The lad leaves and 5 minutes later, his dad came into the office wanting to know when his son could start and trying to negotiate his hourly rate. Oddly, he didn't get the job! I've heard similar stories from all sorts of trades and professions.
In this case, not only was the mother rude and pushy, but she is harming her daughter, both by making her look too timid to make her own enquiries and by teaching her that leaving it all to Mummy is a good idea. It would have been fine to ask for general advice, but what she did was way out of line.

I think that requiring internships to be paid is a middle class construct that unintentionally excludes anyone not in the know (ie the poor and uneducated). It adds layers of barriers that many children from families whose parents can't "give them advice about where to go and who (sic) to speak to" can't overcome. That's been my experience in the various cities that I've lived and worked in in several countries.

I think a casual, polite enquiry "do ye do internships?" would be acceptable.

It's the "look how she's avoiding..." etc is extremely rude.

Who on earth did she think she was speaking to.

I'm imagining the poor daughter when she hears about this. I would have cringed myself inside out if my parents had tried to get a job for me.

CFers and bullies often bring up entitled arses who are just like them; that's where they get it from.

Hang on, SofiaAmes - you’re saying that an unpaid internship is somehow magically more accessible to low income people than a paid internship, which is usually advertised on the website alongside other job vacancies?

I’m... not really sure what to say to that

Sofia how do you think these people would find out about unpaid internships if you don’t think it’s possible for them to find out about paid ones? That doesn’t make any sense.

Ignore and move on.

Perhaps your friend didn't know how government works and how much of a situation it's put yourself in.

Next time OP say "oh brilliant, we are short of volunteers to deliver leaflets in the constituency at the moment and we need some help with admin tasks mainly data entry and envelope stuffing.. "

Watch the pushy mother ring a mile in the opposite direction!!

Weird. Happens in business all the time

Really? People you’ve never met before ask you to create new jobs in your business for their random unscreened family members, and get aggressive when you say “no”? What field is this?

u feel cross? For a woman asking if you could arrange an intern for her DD. hmm
She didn't just ask. She pushed op to change the whole system just for her dd and then got rude and sarcastic when op didnt have a magic wand.

That's a pretty entitled and nasty way to treat someone you have just met.

Someone like that isn't going yo.get anywhere fast and I hope her dd has more idea of how to.treat people you want favours from or she isn't going to get far.

how rude!!!

I know it sounds counterintuitive, but my experience is just that. I do a lot of volunteer work with extremely low income population, non-english speaking immigrants, people experiencing homelessness etc. and my dc's attended our local state/public schools with 65-75% of the students came from families significantly below the poverty rate with large numbers of immigrants. (Note this is in Los Angeles, but I also lived in London in a similar neighborhood with similar schools.)
I find that neither the students and definitely not the parents are sophisticated or educated enough to even begin to know where to go for "published" resources and/or anything on the internet or anything that involves completing forms. Some of this is cultural, some of this is education and some is just life experience. Many of these children only get access through friends and mentors who recommend them for things. They tag along and get something out of the process that hopefully gives them access in some way to something out of their normal track.

(By the way, I am not suggesting that that was the case for the mom in the pub speaking with the OP, but this is in response to posters asking how youth might find out about internships.)

So Sofia that is a significantly different set up to unpaid internships in the UK, where the usual pattern is that Thomasina’s father plays golf with the editor of the FT, so he creates an unpaid internship there allowing her to network and gain experience that is simply not available to Seema or Janelle whose parents work in the post office. Or unexceptional Christopher wants to work in finance, so he asks around the other boys in his class at Winchester and one of his friends’ mothers is a partner at Goldman Sachs so she agrees he can shadow her for the summer, when she wouldn’t dream of inviting that kid in a hoodie who hangs around outside the chicken shop (who might be a straight A student for all she knows). Even solidly middle class kids are excluded from that sort of network.

In contrast, paid internships (and modern apprenticeships) are advertised on both individual company websites and the national apprenticeship website, and there’s a standardised application form and recruitment process. Those schemes are usually much more open to diverse applicants too.

Yes, but at the same time (to use the names that you've used), if Seema's mom works in the post office and the editor of the FT comes in frequently to pick up his Wall Street Journal, then maybe Seema's mom can ask him if he could help Seema out. But having said that, presumably someone working in a post office has to have a certain level of education just to get that job. I'm looking at populations where the parents are often illiterate and have some low paid/cash job as a laborer. I completely understand why unpaid internships were eliminated (the same has happened here in the USA), but I think that the unintended consequences are that some portion of the population has been marginalized out.

I am not sure that there are easy/any solutions to equitable access, but in any case, I don't understand why the OP would take such offense to someone asking about an internship for her daughter. Presumably the person asking didn't know the "correct" way to access a "job" in a politician's office, otherwise she would have already followed that process. The more helpful thing would have been to explain how internships were accessed instead of simply shutting her down with the statement that there are none (which she later goes on to explain isn't in fact true.)

For example, when I lived in London, a neighbor of ours tutored teens who had been permanently excluded from school. He mentioned to us one day that he had a young man who had expressed an interest in being a painter and could we help in some way. My h (now ex) was a builder and we agreed to take him on as a laborer on the days he wasn't receiving tutoring. We tried to make the arrangement official through the council, but for a variety of bureaucratic reasons were never able to do so. So, I paid this young man out of my own pocket and taught him, in addition to building skills, how to fill out a time sheet and show up for work and be a reliable employee etc. etc.. In the end, some years down the line, he started his own business as a decorator and became a productive member of society instead of drug dealer like his older brother or an addict like his mother. This would never have happened if it had to go through the official channels of paid internship.

But you paid him so it was a paid internship!!

But SofiaAmes ; the chances that someone unskilled / uneducated happens to know someone with connections to ask about an internship are astronomically low, surely you see that?

And your analogy with the labourer makes no sense as you paid him - now imagine you offered to do all that but unpaid? He’d have probably have had to turn it down in favour of finding paid work.

I’m not saying the system of paid internships is perfect, there’s still a long way we have to go in terms of achieving equal opportunity for all; but i’m genuinely not seeing how unpaid internships through word of mouth are better for the majority of underprivileged youth?

How obnoxious! I don't think it's your friend's fault though - she can't control the behaviour of others any more than you can.

I paid him a nominal amount after he had been with us awhile to keep him from being tempted to deal drugs by his older brother. But on paper it was an unpaid internship and if I hadn't intervened, it would not have continued because he didn't have the wherewithall (he was stateless because he didn't know how to reach his father and couldn't prove that his mother (from Nigeria) was legally in the country - she was...we just couldn't prove it even after multiple exchanges with various govt offices). The point was really that sometimes official systems with reams of paperwork marginalize the most extreme ends of our society.
I don't know what the solution is....I just see far more extremely underprivileged youth being helped by unofficial means....I think that there should be a way to do unpaid, undocumented internships that are under a certain # of hours per week.

I would be curious to know the statistics on who actually gets the paid internships in government offices....is it still the middle and upperclass...or has the change to requiring them to be paid actually resulted in uneducated/under privileged getting access. There is a chasm between access on paper and access in reality.

The more helpful thing would have been to explain how internships were accessed instead of simply shutting her down with the statement that there are none (which she later goes on to explain isn't in fact true.)

@SofiaAmes There are no internships. I have at no point said there are internships. Because there are not.

There are JOBS in MPs offices, which are advertised publicly, and some of them are part time and entry level and suit students. This is not the same an an internship, which we do not offer and have never offered.

If you are suggesting I should have spent my time explaining to this rude woman how her daughter could go about applying for publicly advertised and available jobs (none of which are available in my office at the moment), I think YABU.

I disagree. I think that unpaid internships are an excellent way to learn about a profession and just because they are not paid with money doesn't mean that they aren't giving all sorts of intangible benefits like experience and an understanding of a profession. I became an architect because my mom met a guy at an art gallery and asked him to take me on as an intern. I spent several months interning for him a few hours a day and left with knowledge about a profession that I had previously known very little about and something that I could put on my resume.
Having said all of that why didn't you explain to the woman what the process was for getting an internship instead of just being dismissive and rude to her. It seems like you do have internships, but they can only be accessed by people who already know how to navigate the process, which hardly sounds inclusive to me.

This post completely sums up those who cannot understand that internships are unfair (but I got a great boost from one!! so they are fab!!) and also makes you wonder how someone who is an architect cannot pass a simple comprehension test. The OP was quite clear about no internships but this architect - created by an unfair internship programme as she says herself - couldn't read that and understand it.

Makes you wonder

FFS I typed a long and interesting (to me) response to this thread regarding unpaid internships and why they boil my piss. Then I accidentally deleted it.

Essentially, in the UK, they are mainly unlawful and unethical outside of a few narrow exemptions pertaining to charity volunteers and students undertaking work experience as part of a bona fide higher education course.

OP you were not being unreasonable. For many reasons

Even paid internships particularly those based in London can be difficult for some students to access who live a considerable distance away.

Finding the money upfront for accommodation/travel/food etc can be difficult as you are generally not paid until the end of the placement.

See this is where British politeness goes too far. She asked, you said no. She asked again, you said no. She then said, look how she's avoiding the question! Taunting you from the sounds of it.

I mean, WTAF

You were WAY too polite.