About a week and a half into my tenure under the Boss from Hell, I arrived at work to find a new full-time designer at the other desk in my holding cell. She had just graduated from art school (a different one than I was attending) and this was her first real job. She reminded me of a lot of the girls I went to school with, so I thought she might be the answer to surviving my summer internship.

After a few days of sporadic conversation and lunches together, however, I think she convinced herself that I wanted to date her (which I didn’t). She decided to make it very clear that she wasn’t interested in me that way, so she became quiet and standoffish. Soon we were going days without speaking.

The computer she worked on, unlike mine, had speakers connected to it. That meant she had full control over the music we listened to, and she chose to play R.E.M. All day long. Every single day. Not a specific R.E.M. album or albums, either, but an hour-and-a-half long mix she had made. On a continuous loop. This relentless exposure only put a temporary dent in my ability to appreciate R.E.M.’s catalog, except for one song—one I will never be able hear again without feeling depressed, angry, and probably a little queasy.

The Boss from Hell was about my dad’s age. He wore bright Hawaiian shirts and always had a scowl on this face. Aside from his wife, who wandered in and answered phones occasionally, he’d been the owner and only employee at his company for years. His place of business was a portion of his house that had been renovated into offices: not exactly the normal burgeoning design firm setup, but considering his chief exports were logos and brochures for computer repair places and industrial manufacturers, it made sense. None of his stuff was that exciting, or even that tastefully executed, but I knew I had to start somewhere.

During my interview he seemed wholly indifferent to me and my work, but surprised me by ending our conversation with “I’ll take you on for the summer, if you want.” The last thing I remember from that meeting was, after he’d gone out to smoke (he maintained something like a four-pack-a-day habit), his wife mentioned that they’d never been able to keep employees around. She couldn’t figure out why. Obviously this was not a great sign, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt. It was already a few weeks into the summer and I had no other prospects, so I had no other choice. I kept reminding myself that even if it wasn’t the greatest work environment, I was going to learn valuable job skills, I would get paid, and it was only for the summer.

When I showed up on the first day, the Boss from Hell led me to a small, dimly-lit room upstairs, crowded with the remnants of printers and computers past. I stayed there for four days, coming in at 8:30 and leaving at 5:30 without anyone saying a word to me. On the occasions when I did venture down to the Boss’s office to ask for an assignment, he’d growl that he’d get to that, but he couldn’t right then. There were two relatively clear desks upstairs, both with working Macs, so I spent my days sort of situating myself on one of them. On the fifth day I heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. The Boss exploded into the room, radiating cigarette breath, and barked out that he needed me to “crank out” some ideas for a logo for a new offset printing company. He wrote their name down and was gone.

He didn’t ask if I was getting settled. There was no mention of my pay rate, which still hadn’t been established. No mention of the fact that whenever he started up any of his Adobe software downstairs, it abruptly closed mine, because he only had one site license. Plus, I had no idea what an offset printing company was, and the concept of “cranking out” some logo ideas was completely foreign to me. A logo was something that had to be researched and discussed and developed. It took at least half a semester to do all that, didn’t it?

I was a few days into this quandary when the full-time designer started and I was introduced to R.E.M.’s “All the Way to Reno (You’re Gonna Be A Star),” from their album Reveal. From the first time I heard the down-tempo intro the song seemed, to me, to be a sonic embodiment of that place.

It didn’t help that, I swear, I heard it four or five times as often as any of the other songs on this mix. It’s very possible that my particular DJ was manually selecting it for airplay that often. (She clearly had no problem with repetition.) Or perhaps it just managed to capture my attention, when it did cue up, more effectively than the other tracks did. Maybe, in an alternate universe, this track would be one of my all-time favorite songs. In my current incarnation, however, it was that place, and I couldn’t stand it.

I’d sat through it at least fifteen times before I finally got up the guts to ask the Boss from Hell how much he was planning on paying me. This exchange went surprisingly well, with him offering seven dollars an hour and me accepting solely on the grounds that he was being civil for once. I tried to keep the momentum going the next day, but ended up interrupting a meeting with a client to ask him if he could get a separate software license for me. I had never been yelled at like that before. Especially not while standing on the bottom step of a staircase, with a total stranger witnessing it all.

The Boss from Hell flew off the handle at everyone, sooner or later. The other designer. Printers. Delivery people. I could sometimes hear him and his wife getting into shouting matches through the floor. Once his pre-teen daughter entered the offices and all three of them got into it. A few minutes later, she drove away in his truck, which, judging by his reaction, he hadn’t expected her to do. And whenever something bad happened I was hearing, had just heard, or was about to hear Michael Stipe, crooning in his melodramatic affectation, “Humming / All the way to Reno / Blah-Blah-Blah-Blah Blah-Blah-Blah.”

So, of course, “All the Way to Reno” was cued up when I came in after having erased some very important in-progress project files the previous afternoon. It was almost the end of the summer, but this was by far the worst mistake I’d made in my time there. So bad that the Boss from Hell had called me at my parents’ house that night to yell at me over the phone and then hung up on me before I even had a chance to apologize. I entered his house the next day feeling nervous. He wasn’t in his office, so I snuck upstairs. The song had started before I even entered the room. I got to my desk and found my that timesheet for the week had been ripped into pieces.

I took this to mean I was fired. I asked the other designer if she knew what was going on, but she just shook her head. The next person I encountered was the wife. I asked her if I was being dismissed. She chuckled at me and, in a sing-song voice, replied “Oh no, he’s not going to do that! You know, that’s just how he is.” Everyone at this place was certifiably insane.

As I waited in silence, in that crappy upstairs room, for the Boss from Hell to come and continue his tirade about my screw-up, I stared at the clock in the corner of my computer screen. I watched the seconds pass, each one bringing me a tiny bit closer to clocking out, going home for the night, and collapsing into bed. The song reached its chorus. “You know what you are. You’re gonna be a star,” Michael Stipe whined. “You know what you are. You’re gonna be a star.”

I had never believed anyone less in my life.