The new office chair gleamed with its chrome armrests, soft leather upholstery, and comfortable headrest.
Oleg Ivanovich had bought that expensive chair for Kostya, the head of sales, while I had been sitting on the same old chair from the conference room for five months.
I was twenty-three years old, had graduated with honors in East Asian studies, and had spent five years studying Korean, including professional translation.
Despite that, I worked as an unpaid intern at a company that supplied electronic components, where I had never once been given a task that matched my qualifications.
My daily routine consisted of delivering documents to government offices, buying lunch for the director,
cleaning his office before meetings, sorting the incoming mail, and washing dishes in the kitchen after every conference.
I did all of this without receiving a salary, while month after month I was promised that I would at least receive a strong recommendation when my internship ended. When I asked in February
when I would finally receive an employment contract or at least a paid internship agreement, Oleg Ivanovich coldly informed me that interns were not entitled to any salary because, in his opinion, the experience itself was more than enough compensation.
I carefully recorded every single working day in a notebook. Dates, working hours, completed tasks, and every small detail were written down because I had originally started keeping it as part of my internship report.
At the time, I had no idea that this notebook would later become my most important piece of evidence.
Everything changed unexpectedly in April. The company was preparing to sign a major contract with a South Korean supplier worth several million rubles.
However, at the very last moment, the official interpreter canceled because of illness. Panic spread throughout the office because nobody else spoke Korean.
That was when I offered to handle the interpreting myself since I had spent years at university preparing for exactly this kind of professional work.
For two and a half hours I interpreted the entire meeting, including technical discussions, contract conditions, and business negotiations.
Mr. Park, the Korean representative, nodded approvingly several times before personally handing me his business card and thanking me for my accurate work. The meeting ended successfully, and the company managed to save the multi-million-ruble contract.
I expected to receive at least a simple word of thanks, but instead Kostya was rewarded with an eighty-thousand-ruble bonus because he was officially listed as the project manager.
I was not even mentioned, and later that same day I was sent back to sorting mail as though nothing unusual had happened.
During the following weeks I translated every email written in Korean and prepared every response, yet under the director’s instructions every message was signed using Kostya’s name.
I completed twenty-two business letters while the Korean partners continued praising him because they believed he was communicating with them. I continued recording the time spent and the contents of every translation in my notebook with complete accuracy.
During the company’s anniversary celebration, the director publicly praised Kostya for the successful international negotiations,
while the company’s accountant, Svetlana, quietly walked over to me and admitted that everyone in the office knew I had done the actual work, but nobody dared to say it aloud.
After some time I decided that I would no longer continue translating without pay. In a polite email I informed Oleg Ivanovich that translation duties were not part of my internship responsibilities and suggested that all future correspondence should be handled by the colleague
whom he had officially introduced as the project’s manager. A few days later the Korean partner contacted the director directly, explaining that they missed their previous contact person because the quality of the correspondence had noticeably declined.
That was when it became obvious that Kostya did not understand a single word of Korean, while the automatic translation software produced serious mistakes throughout the technical documentation. The director angrily blamed me,
claiming that I was putting the company’s future at risk. When I calmly replied that professional translation deserved proper payment, he openly declared that interns were nothing more than easily replaceable labor.
After that I contacted a professional translation agency to learn the official market rates before reaching out to the labor inspectorate as well.
There I was informed that if an intern regularly performed the duties of a full-time employee without a contract or salary, it could legally be considered a violation. At that moment I realized that every note I had written down could become extremely important.
At home I carefully calculated the value of all the translation work I had completed. The business meetings, technical correspondence, phone conversations, and preparation together added up to approximately one hundred and twenty hours.
Based on the official market rates, the total value of my work came to approximately three hundred and sixty thousand rubles.
On the day the final contract was supposed to be signed, I once again interpreted the entire meeting. However, just before the signatures were placed on the documents, I handed Oleg Ivanovich an official invoice for all the translation services I had provided.
I calmly explained that this had never been a favor or a personal courtesy but professional work that I had performed without payment for several months.
Mr. Park overheard the conversation and asked me in Korean whether I had truly received no payment whatsoever for my work. When I answered yes, he quietly placed his pen back on the table and announced
that the contract would not be signed until the company resolved the translator’s situation fairly. He emphasized that his company preferred doing business with partners who treated their employees with respect and fairness.
The director immediately accused me of blackmail, but I calmly informed him that I had already reported the entire situation to the labor inspectorate.
After that I placed my internship identification badge on the table, said goodbye, and walked out of the building for the first time without anyone assigning me another humiliating task.
A few weeks later the labor authorities officially opened an investigation. Svetlana confirmed the accuracy of my records as a witness, while the Korean contract remained temporarily on hold.
Shortly afterward Mr. Park personally called me and offered me a position at his own company as an international coordinator. The salary was four times higher than what Kostya had previously earned.
Later I heard that Oleg Ivanovich was telling everyone that I was an ungrateful blackmailer who had damaged the company. I saw the entire situation very differently.
My old notebook still rested inside the drawer of my desk, containing the detailed record of every single one of those one hundred and thirty-two working days.
To me, those pages proved that professional knowledge, honest work, and personal dignity always have value, even when someone refuses to acknowledge that value for a very long time.
