Three Weeks and a Meatloaf Roll

Fifteen were supposed to show for the course. Eight came on the first day. Four made it to the end: Andi, who spent most of his hours in a radio station’s online chat room marrying strangers; Sven, who drove us along the B12 like every passing opportunity was a dare; Alex, who was a farmer in every way that counted; and me. Three weeks inside a job-placement program run by DEKRA, a German certification outfit, whose official aim was to get us into internships and whose actual achievement was testing how long before people gave up and vanished.

I’ll miss our course leader, Frau Mayer, who navigated the whole thing with more patience than it deserved. I’ll miss the local butcher counter—the Leberkäse rolls with mustard specifically, though whatever kept turning up as a surprise inside the pasta was a different matter entirely. I’ll miss the supermarket across the road that kept us running on iced tea and frankfurters.

I did learn things. How to automate commands in a chat interface. How to convince a shared PC to refuse a two-euro game demo. How to accumulate MySpace friends at an unreasonable speed. Also, technically, how to write a job application—which is presumably what DEKRA had in mind all along. Starting Monday, the next internship: a care home for the elderly. I get to go and unsettle old people again. Should be interesting.