Good Help Is Hard To Find

It's been busy at work lately, and the new director wants to start doing a whole bunch of new stuff, so they opened a job position for another programmer. In theory, that's a good thing, because there would be someone to take up part of the load and bounce ideas off of.
In practice, it will probably be a huge waste of time because finding a qualified programmer is nearly impossible. I don't know if it's the location (far enough away from most other tech jobs that it's a longer commute), the pay, the absurd hiring/searching process, the drug screening, or just actually a lack of qualified people looking for jobs, but in any case I'm not holding my breath waiting for someone to help.
In the meantime, we have an intern. And not a newly-graduated-from-college intern or even a will-graduate-from-college-in-two-years intern, but a high school intern.
I don't know what genius thought up this program, but... Let's just say that coming up with something for this guy to do is harder than most of the things I do on a daily basis. He started on Monday, and my boss was on vacation all last week. I spent about an hour explaining the twenty minute task that we had come up with, and thankfully that took him over a day. I feel kind of bad for not finding something else for him to do for the rest of the week, but let's recap here: I'm a contractor, I don't work in the office four days out of five, and I have no desire to manage people. This is not my problem.
So basically, if the point of having high school interns was to encourage kids to go into engineering, I'm pretty sure this will backfire. On the other hand, it's probably a realistic view into life at a big company. So maybe this poor kid will be convinced to do something more productive.