Naomi Campbell has pleaded guilty to chucking her cell phone at her maid’s head. For those not familiar with the tale, Campbell was pissed because she couldn’t find a pair of jeans that were supposed to be in her upstairs closet (turns out they were allegedly in her downstairs closet, the domain of a whole other maid). While her maid was searching for them in the closet, with her back to Campbell, Campbell lost it and sent the phone sailing across the room, hitting Ana Scolavino in the back of the head.
As a result, Campbell is being sent back to anger management therapy and was slapped with a whopping five hours of community service in Manhattan. That may not sound like much, but just remember Boy George’s trash duty and the humiliation that followed that.
You better believe that if Naomi Campbell has to pick up trash on the streets of New York, STA will be there. With cameras. And maybe stuff to throw. For more details, read this.
That is, according to Perez Hilton so we might just be passing along misinformation. But let’s dare to dream, shall we?
Angelina Jolie Takes Her Assistant Out
What do you think about drinking with the boss? Ice breaker? Good idea? Recipe for disaster? Spill it in the comments section.
At Save the Assistants, we spend a lot of time letting people vent about their jobs. However, it’s important to know the difference between a job that frustrates you once in a while and a job that makes you want to die. This handy list helps you figure out if it’s time to move on:
1. You start to dread Monday as soon as you leave work on Friday.
2. It becomes more and more difficult to get up for work each day, and tardiness becomes a way of life.
3. You cannot muster enthusiasm for anything related to work — other than your paycheck.
Read the rest here.
Temping represents a whole new level of assistantship hell. At one particularly odious temp job, I was an administrative assistant with a development firm. There was a guy who would pass the copier right outside his own office, trek down the long hallway to my cube, and ask me to run five copies of the document in his hand. We would end up walking back up the hall together (to the copier outside his office) so that I could run the copies for him and put them in the little designated box on his desk. So glad we got to share that little bit of exercise and camaraderie. – Submitted by Colleen, Washington, D.C.
This long weekend (or, depending on the company, regular weekend), Save the Assistants was featured on the very cool website Houstonist.com. We here at STA know that bad bosses and nightmare assignments can exist anywhere, so thanks to the bloggers of the Lone Star State for their shoutout.
At my former job, a companywide email went out announcing that we would be expected to work on Martin Luther King Day. A collective groan went up around the office- everyone had expected the day off. Soon after this announcement, there was another email- this one from building management. It turned out that of all the hundred-something companies in our building, we were the only one who would be working that day. The building would not even have heat that day, and all maintenance employees were off-duty. Finally, admitting defeat, our CEO relented and gave us the day off.
Martin Luther King once said that no one can ever jump on your back unless you bend it. He probably wasn’t envisioning that his words would mean so much to a white girl from the suburbs who worked in a corporate office building, but soon after that on-and-off holiday I finally quit my job. I was tired of playing a role in my own oppression. The day I walked out of there was the first time in months I realized that I was no longer bending my back.
Happy Martin Luther King Day, whether you’re in the office or not.
-Lilit
The book Fame Junkies analyzes America’s obsession with celebrity. Author Jake Halpern surveyed middle school students in Rochester, NY, and asked them to rank how they felt about fame, beauty, media, and more. Among some of the more fascinating revelations is this one:
“Given a choice of becoming the CEO of a major corporation, the president of Yale or Harvard, a Navy SEAL, a U.S. senator or “the personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star,” almost half of the girls — 43.4% — chose the assistant role.”
In response, we at Save the Assistants would like to point out Exhibit A, Exhibit B, and Exhibit C. If you want to toil as a celebrity assistant, you should at least know what you’re getting into. And then you should send the horror stories to us.
We all pity the poor beleaguered assistant, but there are a few types out there that irk us. Namely, self-entitled slackers who would just as soon stab someone in the back (or front) as fetch a coffee. Fetching coffee sucks – “fetching” anything sucks, actually – but sometimes, to quote Everyone’s Father, “it’s just part of paying your dues.”
The mystery writer of “Unsolicited” over at Gawker has summed things up nicely. We suggest you take a look for your own sake.
Highlights:
Trytoohardy girl
Maybe she was just born a Tracey-Flick-esque maniac. All I know is, she needs to relax before she pulls a fucking muscle–or somebody smacks her.
The Undercover Writer
She went into publishing thinking she could make the connections to get her book published and have enough time during the day to work on her secret Great American Novel or Memoir about her Grandma/Drinking Habit/Slutty Behavior.
Max Perkins Jr.
He laments the lost days of serious book publishing and waxes (badly) poetic about Max Perkins and three-martini lunches, ignoring the fact that he’s 12 and not even his parents were alive during the “good old days.” He’s pretty much wearing a fedora on the inside.
“Unsolicited: It’s So Hard to Find Good Editorial Assisting Help These Days”
Dear Rebecca,
As my line manager is away, I appreciate your support during those long 3 weeks over Christmas and New Years. But, by making me do overtime to make up the hour and a half I was out of the office at a doctor’s appointment, you’re not making me grateful for your help. You could have asked. Also, please don’t ask reception to ask me to tell you when I go for lunch, and when I come back. I don’t need to be babysat.
Also, when I’m downstairs, actually working – helping someone, again, don’t ask reception to tell me to listen to my messages. I got your message, but the problem I was dealing with was slightly more important. They couldn’t work, whereas you couldn’t send an email.
Anyway, you’ll be fucked when I resign next month.
No Love,
The Pissed Off IT Assistant
-Submitted by Anonymous
The holiday season can be a wonderful time…if you work at a giving sort of company. My last job was always pretty good at giving its employees a little something extra at Christmas. My first year there we all got $500 bonuses in our last paycheck before the holiday break — and I got a $1,500 annual bonus in January after being there for only 4 months. Nice, right? Well apparently I got out of there just in time because a few months after I quit things went downhill fast. As told to me by friends still stuck there, at the all staff meeting before Christmas, the company’s CEO went on and on about how valuable everyone was and how he and management appreciated everyone’s efforts to get the company out of debt (the past CEO had a little problem with embezzlement). He then sent everyone on their merry way until, “Oh wait! I forgot one thing!” The man then proceeded to give everyone a motivational calendar. You know, the cheesy ones with mountain views and picturesque babbling brooks. I suppose they were all expected to meditate upon the calendar in hopes of getting actual cash. Happy New Year! -Submitted by Anna, Raleigh
