Monthly Archive for March, 2007

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tip of the week: if you’re looking, look hard

Published on March 20, 2007 in Survival Guide and Tip of the Week. 0 Comments

So you want to get a new job- what do you do? Well, email every person you’ve ever met and ask if they know about anything, of course. But after that, you start sending out resumes. In the spirit of Laurel Touby, this article gives the top resume errors made by job seekers.

There are some good points: don’t lie, don’t forget a cover letter, and never send your resume on pink paper that smells like flowers. We at STA would like to add our own advice: if you’re looking, look hard. Hit the proverbial ground running. Even if you send out a million and one resumes, send out a million and two. It’s a lot of work, especially since you don’t want each application to be generic, but anything worth doing is going to be a little difficult. Just visualize your boss’ screamy face every time you need help visualizing what you want.

Check out the article here.

naomi campbell watch: that doesn’t look like an orange jumpsuit, dammit

Published on March 20, 2007 in Junk Drawer. 0 Comments

Apparently the phone-wielding supermodel has weaseled her way out of putting on the old orange jumpsuit as she mops floors in the LES. It doesn’t completely destroy our mental image, but it’s still pretty disappointing.

According to Page Six, “Campbell wore green yoga pants, stiletto boots, a black empire-waist coat, diamond-studded earrings, a newsboy cap and large, black sunglasses on her first day of real work.”

Yoga pants and stilettos? What an oxymoron.

the grinch who fired secret santa

Published on March 19, 2007 in Horror Stories. 0 Comments

My boss, Mr. Literary Agent at Boring Ass Agency, was fine (a little high-maintenance, but nothing I couldn’t handle) until he fired me. He did threaten to fire me over starting up a secret santa, but his wife talked him out of that. I guess he didn’t check with her before he fired me 2 weeks later.

He came to my apartment on Saturday afternoon to fire me for an email that another assistant wrote. There was a bitchy comment about a client in the email, and I missed it. I passed the email onto another assistant, who caught the comment. I was fired, and told I could never be trusted again, because I let that email slip through my hands. Every time I tell someone the story, they sit there blankly, waiting for the rest of the story. There isn’t any. That was his reason. My mother still thinks I did something else and I’m just not telling her.

Not content with simply firing me, my boss then refused to pay me severance, threatened to call “lawyers” when I asked for it, refused to be a reference, effectively preventing me from ever getting another job in publishing and made up additional reasons why I was fired after the fact. He tried claiming that he came to my house to prevent “a scene” at work. Who fires someone in their own living room on their day off? Oh wait, he does, because he was leaving for London the next day. My favorite part of the whole thing is that the day he came back, he had to go to the office Christmas party and explain to everyone there that he had fired the person responsible for Secret Santa, and the president of the company wasn’t getting her gift. So he ruined the Christmas party, created some SERIOUS assistant panic for my former co-workers, and ruined my Christmas.

The good news is that when he tattled on me to his boss, his father-in-law (gasp, I know) I was able to write my “I’m so sorry, sir. May I please have another crumb?” email. It earned me my bonus and an extra month’s severance. I wrote a check for the full amount and gave the whole thing to cancer research. I’m currently draining every last dollar from unemployment, so his little freak-out (my boss was under a bit of pressure the week he fired me, and it is my firm belief that he cracked under the pressure, and my firing was his only way of coping, the wuss) cost him WAY more than the raise I was promised and never given. –Submitted by Eleanor, New York City

happy monday, naomi campbell

Published on March 19, 2007 in Junk Drawer. 0 Comments

Naomi has begun her community service in New York today. Unfortunately she’s sequestered inside the warehouse, but somebody’s got to have a telescopic lens. C’mon, paparazzi – if there was ever a time to invade someone’s privacy, this is it.

week in review: cyclops and sirens and harpies, oh my!

Published on March 16, 2007 in Week in Review. 0 Comments

Happy (almost) St. Patrick’s Day! In honor of the holiday, you should:

and now a word from smoldering lawyer clive

Published on March 14, 2007 in Junk Drawer, Survival Guide and Tip of the Week. 0 Comments

“Hello, all you sons-of-bitches stuck in cubicles and such. Having a laugh at this site, are you? That’s all well and good, but I have some important advice for you.

With St. Patrick’s Day right around the corner, there will probably be a few opportunities to get sloshed and quite possibly dance like that fairy, Michael Flatley. Er, I mean, do a jig. (That wasn’t very lawyerly of me call him a fairy, was it? He’s really just a sod.)

As I was saying, there will be opportunity to drink. The important thing you need to keep in mind is that you should not be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with your boss like you would with your friends. First of all, it’s on a Saturday this year so you shouldn’t be anywhere near your boss. Second of all, what will most likely happen is that one of you will have too much green beer and too little corned beef and things will get ugly. There may be behavior that you don’t want to see in your boss, and Her Majesty knows that you don’t want to get caught with your knickers down either, so to speak.

So, as you carouse and make merry on this oh-so-saintly day, keep this mind: do not party with your boss like you would party with your friends. Still hasn’t sunk in? Well, ask yourself why your boss, who is probably a great deal older than you, would even want to party with you if not to have someone who is obligated to peel them from the bar, put them in a cab, pay the cabbie after they vomit all over the backseat, and not ask questions? Right.

Take my advice, young ladies and gents, and keep the work-related drinking to a minimum. I am a smoldering lawyer, after all.

Thanks,
S.L. Clive

P.S. Avoid the whiskey entirely.”

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getting away from the guido

Published on March 13, 2007 in Horror Stories. 0 Comments

I thought that I had worked for the worst boss on earth at a big investment firm while living in Manhattan. Boy, was I wrong! In an effort to avoid a Xanax addiction and a hefty therapy bill, I relocated from bitter New York to sunny Arizona. I landed what I anticipated to be a kick-ass gig as an executive assistant with another newbie originally from Indiana. I took a MAJOR pay cut but was promised raises, which never materialized! In the beginning, it was fantastic. Our boss was buying us fancy lunches every day, he gave us money to decorate our desks, gave me money to take my friends to drinks one Friday evening after work and even sent me home early some days.

It went downhill for the other assistant first. The “Guido” (as we now lovingly refer to him) made sexual overtures to her, touching her hair and making grossly inappropriate comments laced with innuendo. This was mixed with condescending commentary directed at the two of us (mind you, we both have our bachelor’s degrees and she is two semesters short of a law degree!). In the Guido’s own words, “no task is below you, no task is above you”. He sure wasn’t kidding about that! That included sending us on protein bar hunts, making us pose as his son’s nanny/personal assistant at school, cleaning his house, and our all-time personal favorite, scrubbing the office toilet because the cheap SOB wouldn’t spring for a cleaning crew. The other assistant was canned first because she wouldn’t sleep with the Guido and somehow I lasted another month and a half at Guidoville. I thank that greasy slimeball for bringing the two of us together…we are great friends now, but I pity the next assistant who has to put up with his creepy behavior, his strange requests and being paid like a freaking PEON!!!

I got fired by this joker this morning. He texted me to meet him at Starbucks (and didn’t even pay for my coffee, ass!) and told me that he was letting me go. Good riddance. –Submitted by “Rescued from Guidoville,” Tempe, Arizona

workplace distraction: the popularity dialer

Published on March 13, 2007 in Junk Drawer. 0 Comments

As Josie Jobless taught us last week, sometimes it’s OK to exploit your beleaguered-ness. After all, if you’re going to spend so much time getting treated like dirt, you might as well use it to your advantage once in a while. That’s why we love this site.

Need to get out of a blind date? Popularity Dialer has preprogrammed phone calls that you can schedule for any time. Our favorite, of course, is the Boss Call, where “Mr. Johnson” calls to tell you to come to the office and fix the copier.

Warning: listen to the message before arranging it to call you, or you might bust out laughing halfway through and spoil the whole thing. We speak from experience, OK?

behind the music executives

Published on March 12, 2007 in Horror Stories. 0 Comments

This post has been removed at the request of the submitter. Please contact us with any questions.

the trappings of being a “yes” person

Published on March 12, 2007 in Horror Stories. 0 Comments

Submitted by a beleaguered reader, this article brings up some painful and all-too-familiar memories.

“It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when my once-upon-a-time sweet supervisor crossed the line and morphed into the boss from hell. After all, there were so many moments that could have been the defining one:

-The time she asked me to buy her tampons and bring them to her at home. (She was working from home. This makes it OK, right?)

-The night she sent me to three, yes, three different Targets, searching for a sale priced bowl for a company event.

-And perhaps my favorite: the day she enlisted me to help her plan a charity fundraiser. A good idea, or so it seemed. But at 1:30 AM when I was standing in a cold empty field with my tipsy boss and a glass of flat bubbly, a lost purse, and dozens of unreconciled bar tabs and credit card slips, I began to seriously question my sanity.

There are dozens more sad stories. I did all her dirty work and she got all the glory. I fired consultants and told the graphic designer we didn’t like any of the designs. I spent a day researching glue…”

To read the rest of “The Boss from Hell”, click here.

Sadly, this beleaguered assistant has not quit their job yet so we’d like to take a moment to educate them about Stockholm syndrome.