Notes from the Front: Interning at Kershner Office Furniture

Before I begin properly, it is worth mentioning that I have worked in an office before. While my friends from school were out delivering pizzas and working behind the counters at ice cream shops last summer, I was doing mail merges on contact software and scanning legal documents onto the computer. It was tedious work, but the pay wasn’t bad and the people were friendly and I could take a day off when I felt like it.

The worst part of the work, though – what made me dread getting up on a weekday morning – was the office’s atmosphere. The paint was gray. The floor was gray. I worked at two brown desks pushed together in an awkward L-shape and sat on a chair with two broken casters. The walls were lined with stacks of boxes upon boxes of files. My office smelled like hot paper – a terrible, overwhelming, coppery stench you can only recognize if you’ve ever shredded several reams of thick legal copy in a chunky Staples shredder that only takes 12 sheets of paper at a time. The photocopier was jammed next to the office supply cabinet and postage-by-phone machine in a half-walled cubby that would barely fit one employee. If you needed a file folder, you went to the front of the office, hoped the closet’s sliding door wasn’t off its track, and then searched among its splintery wooden shelves packed tight with old plastic Tupperwares and Christmas lights contained in boxes that for reasons that baffle me still were originally for bras.

I just started interning here at Kershner Office Furniture, and to say it's a big change from my last job would be the understatement of the year. The experience is something akin to working in a brochure. The environment is professional and sleek; my own desk has such amenities as a linen pinboard, customizable shelving, and built-in frosted glass cabinets. My employer’s office is more conservative – his workstation is built to include several wooden cabinets, and the oval table in the center of the room is a polished dark grain. The cubicles feature glass panes near the tops of the walls, effectively eliminating that isolating feeling they tend towards; the rainbow-backed chairs that sit around one of the meeting tables in the back give their surroundings a jovial air.

I could go on and on about the various ways that the office here proves itself a beautiful space, but what it all boils down to is this: I like waking up to come here. It’s a nice place to work

So whether you’re moving offices or opening up a new one – or if you currently work in a space like the one in which I spent last summer – come down to the Kershner Office Furniture showroom. The worst thing that could happen is that you spend a few minutes on Bruer’s patented two-nickel tour and you don’t see anything you’re interested in. I mean, we’re like right by the mall. It’d still be a great excuse to get a Cinnabon.

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Sam Austin is a senior at Conestoga High School and an intern at Kershner Office Furniture. Besides office furniture supplier marketing, his interests include Ultimate Frisbee, creative writing, and the glockenspiel.