Thursday, September 29th

Now that Monte is back in New York and back in the office, my days are a little more regular. Today I did the normal tasks of getting the food and tea for Monte and turning on the lights and unlocking doors around the office. Then I sat down and archived some emails in his office and then did the call sheet out at Renata's desk. Once all the computer work was done, I opened all of Monte's mail. All of his mail is to be opened and taken out of the envelopes and stapled together. I have to separate the mail into a business pile and a home pile and then place them on his desk. Once the mail was finished, Renata had to go in to Monte's office for a three hour meeting with some guests that came in. That didn't leave a lot for me and the other intern to do, so I did a lot of artist news and wrote a piece on Jessie J and Nicki Minaj. It was a pretty stereotypical day and I didn't mind it too much. It was kind of nice to keep to myself and my work and get a lot done. I spent a lot of time on the computer and I organized my desk space a little so I feel more settled in.

Wednesday, September 28th

Today was a stressful day because we learned how to use the phones. By "use the phones" I mean answering and directing Monte's calls, which the workers here take very seriously. And that's understandable because there are some very important people that call here. You always answer the phone with "Monte Lipman's office". The person will normally state their name and ask if Monte is around, but you always double ask their name so you can write it down, and then you write down the phone number that shows up on the phone down next to their name. If Monte is in his office (which he always is) you tell the caller that he is on a phone call or in a meeting, because you don't know what Monte is doing in his office or how important it is and you never want to interrupt. If it's a really important person calling, like an artist, you are supposed to put them on hold, write their name and what line they're on down on a post it and then take it in to Monte's office. He will either tell you to keep them on hold and he'll pick up, or he tells you to tell them that he'll call them back. After we learned the basics, Blaine and I had to go through test phone calls where Renata pretended to be someone calling the office and then she graded us on how we did. The first time I went I got a B+, but by the end I had an A+.

Tuesday, September 27th

First thing when I got in to the office today, I learned how to restock the CDs in the office. I went through a step by step process on a website. The website is called EGratis and it was very simple to use. You type in the username and password for the company and then click on free goods request. This lets the site know that it’s for the company and that's who will be paying for it. When we order from this site, we never order the edited versions of albums. We always get the unedited, deluxe versions so that the people who get the CDs get what was meant to be on the album. After you select the album and artist you want, you type in the reason for the order, which is always office supply and then hit submit. It was really easy, and now I feel confident that I'll be able to check the cabinet and immediately order what is missing, as opposed to asking Renata about it. For the remainder of the day, I walked around the 8th floor to take inventory of who needed more of what CDs. Today was another day of people interaction, so I had fun.

Monday, September 26th

Today I learned how to use the CDs that we have in our office. The CDs are kept in the bottom cabinet and they're in alphabetical order. There are a whole bunch of artists in there, and each artist has to have 10 to 15 albums in the cabinet at all times. The CDs are handed out to people that come in for meetings with Monte, to people around the office, or to guest artists. Renata also taught me how to make a bag for guests leaving the office. You have to try and guess what kind of music they like basically. She told us that if someone like Slim or Baby comes in to the office, you're obviously not going to give them a Colbie Caillat CD, you would give them CDs more along the lines of Nicki Minaj. There was a man, Andrew, who came in today to have a meeting with Monte. That was my chance to make a CD bag for him and I thought I did a pretty good job. He was dressed in a nice suit and had glasses and was very polite. He even took the time to meet all of the interns, which rarely happens. I threw in some classic rock that we have, a little jazz and easy listening, and then added some Lady Gaga just to mix it up. Once he left, I reorganized the CD cabinet which took forever. I re-alphabetized all of the artists and made sure they had the amount of albums they needed. Renate told me she would teach me tomorrow how to restock artist CDs that didn't have enough. I had a lot of catching up to do though since I was sick on Friday and missed a day.

Thursday, September 22nd

Today was all about Lil Wayne. His new album Tha Carter IV was released at the beginning of the month and it sold nearly one million albums in just the first week. I did a lot of research on Lil Wayne today because I wrote a huge artist news article about him and all the crazy success he's been having. His new album sold 964 thousand copies in just the first week, and the only other person to have a higher record than that is Lady Gaga with one million copies. Lady Gaga is also on our label. We got a whole bunch of shipments in of his CD too and I got a deluxe target copy for free. I get a whole bunch of fun artist promotional stuff from my work. I also got a bracelet and some sunglasses for our artists Dev. We got our charts in today to say where some of our artists stood and how many records we sold that week, and as a label as a whole we sold just over one million. That means that almost all of those sales were from Lil Wayne. The office was abuzz with Lil Wayne talk all day and it seemed like he was everywhere. When I archived Monte's emails, there were a lot about Lil Wayne and where they were going to go from there. My article about him talked a little about his past compared to the amount of crazy success he has now.

Wednesday, September 21st

I had to stay kind of late at work today because Monte comes back to the office tomorrow. I was supposed to leave at 6 at night, but I didn't leave until around 8. A whole bunch of the work I did today was mailing. I spent the day licking envelopes and writing addresses. By the last half hour of the day, I went on to Staples.com and ordered an envelop glue stick so that I wouldn't have to lick them anymore. I sent all of the mail today by UPS, which requires a certain process on the computer that I learned my first day here. All of the mail except for two pieces were going to other places in New York City. A lot of it was also promotional pictures and bobble heads for our artist Mayor Hawthorne. We sent some promotions to The Today Show, The View, and Regis and Kelly. The California packages were going to The Ellen Show. It was fun to be a part of promoting a new artist even if that meant just sealing and addressing envelopes. We were cut really short on time though; our mail is taken out at 5 and the UPS is picked up at 8 and we sent out our UPS boxes at 7:50. It was a long day, but I felt accomplished that I got a lot done; even if I didn't have time to do artist news and sound scans.