A Day in the Life of a Summer Intern: Introducing the ‘Tactus’

By Kiran Aditham 

Well, the outpouring has been great this week in terms of interns sharing their thoughts. Let’s yell TGIF and ring in the weekend with this installment from Mother NY interns Forde Kay and Emily Edelman. We’ve never heard of a “Tactus” before, but let’s find out more from the pair below (and in the video above).

We (Forde Kay and Emily Edelman) are a killer intern-partnership at Mother New York (if we do say so ourselves). We’re on the Experience team, so we spend all day brainstorming ways that clients can earn the media’s attention, rather than buy it through ad spots or billboards. Mother allows us to be creative, fun, clever, smart, beautiful, and crazy. We are also really good at finding things in the kitchen to make amazing snacks. I, Forde, eat anything that’s in front of me really fast, and I’m sure it’s gross to watch and I, Emily, love bread with Nutella spread on it.
When the two of us came to the Mother office, we were blown away by the inspiration the office and the people in the space offered. Yet, as clever and close to perfection as Mother New York is, there was one problem that we noticed.  All around the office are giant boards for tacking up work. This means that there are also tacks everywhere, which have been kept in cereal bowls that litter the floor like land mines. In fact, our research told us that on average, someone trips twice an hour, and there is an average of one hospital visit a day.
Taking action, we decided to fix this problem as a thank you to Mother for their internship opportunity (but mostly to look really good). After many-a-sketch, many-a-trip to Canal Plastics, and many-a-craft supply, Tactus was born.
Tactus is a tack-holding cactus. It is made using 90-degree PVC elbows, decoupaged cactus imagery, and a heavy duty magnet. Tactus turns the office’s I-beams into Suguaro-like Cacti and provides safe, off-the-ground storage for the office’s 3,256 (very accurate guesstimate) currently-unused tacks. The Tacti’s large magnet can also be held above a floor of spilt tacks, easily collecting them.
Not only did we design and produce the twenty Tacti, we also made a video to inform Mother of the office’s new key feature. When Mother employees filtered into work Monday morning, the Tacti were at home on their I-beam-poles, and the video was waiting in everyone’s inboxes.

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Do you have a tack problem? Is your agency in trouble? Contact Forde and Emily at Mother New York, and we will provide you with a *sharp* solution.

As for what this internship has been like, we think we can safely say that it’s been the bomb.

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