I referred to Nate as Jellyvision's intern in my last blog (A Year of Working) and that's not entirely true. He started as an intern, but now is an official employee. He even does some writing for the You Don't Know Jack' game and occasional voice work as one of the game's characters (The character? "Nate the intern").

Before Jellyvision Nate worked as an intern at iO. Students can do various tasks around the theater, liking taking tickets, to get free or discounted improv classes.

Nate: I actually interned during Whirled News. So I saw lots of your shows.
Me: I didn't know that.
Nate: Basically I've been working for you for the last three years.

A big chunk of Nate's current job is customer service. Answering e-mails and letters, filling orders from our on-line store. He personalizes a lot of the correspondence, sending jokes from "Nate the intern." Still, customer service largely involves dealing with idiots.

Nate: I've lost all faith in humanity.

He recently got a hand-written letter on patriotic stationary, asking for the price of nearly all our products.

Nate: So... this person had to go on our website and look up the exact names of every product and write them out. But the prices are right there on the site next to the names! It's crazy.

There was a lot of discussion about how he should respond. I suggested he should try to drag the correspondence out as long as possible. Maybe respond with, "Just double checking to see if these are the products you want the prices for," followed by the same list with no prices.

Nate wrote and printed out a long response that he has sitting on his desk. He hasn't decided whether to send it or not.