10/7/14, 4:00PM
“A little busy bee?” What did Gary really mean? Why would he call me that? Even Google doesn’t have an explanation of that phrase. Ahhhh… Why is it so annoying? I kept thinking and thinking and I didn’t realize that I was walking towards the glass door. “Ouch! My head!” Seriously? I literally bumped into a glass door. I looked around and people were laughing out loud. Great, now I would probably become the superstar of the company who hit the door with my head. I hope nobody took a picture and shared it on our company’s social media page.
I couldn’t stay for one more second and wanted to run away. However, a familiar voice from behind prevented me. Who was that? I turned around and saw Ricardo, a director that I met from our last social event. HE remembered ME? Now it’s even more embarrassing because he probably saw me hitting the door with my “brilliant” head.
I stopped for a second and he was already in front of me, laughing. I was right. He saw it. My life is over. I swallowed those embarrassments and pretended that nothing had happened. I said hi to him and we started chatting while walking to our offices. Obviously, he saw that I had something in mind and asked me what was bothering me. I began to hesitate in answering because I was scared that this was going to ruin my career. However, he seemed to be a person that I could trust. “Ok, maybe I could give it a try and see if he could help me.” I told Ricardo that I was helping another department and what happened between me and Gary. Surprisingly, he was not surprised about what was going on. More surprisingly, he was a very close friend of Gary’s. He told me that Gary called everyone “a busy bee.” More importantly, he said Gary is a super nice person, but his facial expressions can sometimes be misinterpreted. He even suggested that the three of us go to lunch together, but in order to make the company pay for the expense, it had to be a mentor-mentee lunch. That was exactly what I wanted. I needed one, no, two mentors to guide me through my internship. Immediately, I asked if he could be my mentor. “Deal!” He said. Haha, I felt so relieved. Great! Now, I have two mentors.
In the following two weeks, I asked Ricardo and Gary a lot of burning questions and they gave me the most valuable suggestions I had ever received. I performed even better in my job and continued building great relationships with the team. However, terrible things also happened to me every now and then for some reason. I went to meet a client contact to gather some information about our current project but he refused to do anything. He seemed super mean and uncooperative. We only spent five minutes talking and he had to run to another meeting. I sent him multiple emails to follow up but he didn’t reply at all. What’s worse was that Ricardo was on vacation and Gary was out of office for a business trip. What should I do? How should I communicate with this client contact outside of our office? Should I tell my manager about this? What would my manager think about me not being able to gather the information that I need?