This summer I spent six weeks managing six interns, mostly older than me, at an arts organization. I don’t know how I ended up in this position, but I like to think that I made the most of my time.

Objectively, my job was great. I was paid twenty-one dollars an hour (five dollars more than at my cafe management job) to work with bartenders in creating show-themed cocktails, to film instagram reels, to entertain artists and donors at catered events with slightly stale canapés, and to mingle with board members, most of whom were beautiful women recently retired from careers in law, and who now spent their time taking care of much older husbands and patronizing the arts. 

But work didn’t always look like that. One day, I spent nine hours designing a program, printing it out, running it by my boss, making a correction, printing it again, checking it once more, correcting one last time, and finally, printing out 250 of the now-flawless programs to fold and staple in a dark conference room. For obvious reasons, I was horribly bored. I left the conference room and tried to find the other interns. Maybe they were also horribly bored? I knew I had to be tactful; I could not be the one to come clean first. When I found the others, I asked what they were up to, careful to make it clear that I was asking as a friend, not a supervisor. An older girl, a Shakespeare-focused theater major with a nearly impenetrable positive attitude, responded “you know, just watching the door to let artists in.” I looked to the rest. A few seconds passed. Finally, one of the younger, less-filtered interns blurted out, “I’m so fucking bored.” 

From that moment on, it was clear that the best way to bond with the interns was to complain. We complained about the last-minute schedule changes, the weird hours, the artists that never said hi back, and the lugging of forty-pound-costume boxes between the costume shop and the theater after every show. We talked about other things too: our love lives, our plans for the future, who the best cast member was. But, inevitably, we’d come back to complaining. By the conclusion of the third week, we didn’t even need to talk to complain–we only had to exchange a look roughly translating to “I want to kill myself, do you want to kill yourself? Should we make it easier and kill each other?” Perhaps it was unprofessional to complain about work with people that I oversaw. But it established an intimacy that made the work bearable. It was our little secret. 

As the season continued, I learned that there is a time and place for complaining. When the artist that I drive complains about her schedule, I don’t point out that in order for me to drive her, morning and night, I wake up earlier than her and go to bed later than her. And when my boss asks if I’m doing well after a twelve-hour-long strike during which my job was to carry two keyboards and benches, two human-sized poster stands, and five trays of food across three blocks and up four flights of stairs in formal-wear in a hundred degree heat, I don’t tell her that I’m exhausted to the point of delirium. But when my intern tells me that their back hurts from sitting on the stairs of the costume shop for eight hours it would be rude for me not to add my own grievances to the mix. 

There was a time that my boss and I, albeit discreetly, shared in the tradition of complaining together. We had a particular board member with a proclivity for showing up unannounced at the office, at the busiest times on the busiest days, to sit at my boss’s desk and tell her everything that she was doing wrong. One of these days, as I let this board member into my boss’s office, my boss and I shared a knowing glance. It lasted less than a second, but there was no mistaking it. An hour later, after the board member left, I headed back eagerly to my boss’s office, searching for that complaining glint in her eye–but it was gone.