Former Destiny’s Child singer Kelly Rowland gets paid to show up at events and wear designer clothes. But it turns out some of that money is going to a good cause. She recently went down to the British Auto Show (which is like the equivalent of the Detroit one here in the states, where the newest auto models are unveiled) and liked the Lotus Elise car so much that she bought three of them. Now, any of us who have ever seen an episode of Cribs know that a celebrity has no problems with owning multiples of the same expensive car, but Kelly didn’t seem to concur. She bought one in orange (her favorite color) to keep, and then two more (one blue, one gray) for her manager and for her assistant. I don’t doubt that that car costs many times what the average assistant makes in a year, so kudos to Kelly for pulling a Stone Phillips giving her assistant such a cool present. I’m just dying to know, though…did she get the blue one or the gray one?
Monthly Archive for July, 2008
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As The Office’s US version continues to succeed commercially and with critics, there are more reports of a potential spinoff. Today the very funny and cool Amy Poehler (who just scored a Supporting Actress nomination for her many roles on Saturday Night Live and who is married to the equally funny and cool Will “GOB” Arnett) has been confirmed to star on the show. Comedian Aziz Ansari is the only other actor who has definitely been cast so far, and there’s no definite plot/location/character list for the show. Since both Saturday Night Live and The Office are NBC properties, it makes sense for the network to work with someone they already have a relationship with–after all, Amy’s former SNL cohost (and Baby Mama costar) Tina Fey writes and stars in NBC’s 30 Rock, a project which has worked out really well so far. That said, I’ll miss Amy’s great delivery on Weekend Update, but no matter where she ends up she’ll be funny. And imagine if she played an assistant! We’d be honored to count Amy as one of our own.
There’s a running joke at the University of North Carolina that when you enroll and get a list of the UNC majors that have been the most lucrative for alums, #1 is Geography. Can you believe a Geography major is now earning more than someone who did Business Administration or Computer Science? Well, if you pay close enough attention, you’ll realize that one Geography alum earns so much money he skews all the statistics–Michael Jordan.
If that’s not enough to make you feel inferior, Yahoo has “helpfully” provided a list of the most lucrative college majors. Because if there’s anything I need to get me through a boring Thursday afternoon at work, it’s a list of things I should have done a couple of years ago that might not have made my current day so boring. Thanks, Yahoo!
Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal, who along with David Beckham is probably the most recognized (and, um, most hot) soccer player in the world, recently suffered an injury that will have him hobbling around on crutches for awhile. To pass the time during his recovery, he’s been hanging out in L.A. Entertainment Lawyer reports that Paris Hilton tried to pick Ronaldo up at a party, but he declined. And who was he at the party with? A woman he referred to as his “assistant,” who was with him to “aid his recovery.” Entertainment Lawyer wasn’t buying it either, but hey… would you turn down a chance to be Ronaldo’s personal nursemaid? At the very least, you know his disinterest in hooking up with Paris Hilton indicates he has common sense and good taste.
China is doing whatever they can to clean up their international image just before the Olympics start. One of their very welcome changes is a brand-new law against sexual harassment at work. A startling (and saddening) 79 percent of Chinese working women reported having been victim of some kind of harassment at the office. Before the law was passed, the very few women who were brave enough to press charges had their cases filed in civil court, where they were arbitrated quietly.
The first person convicted under the new anti-harassment law is a male office manager who came onto a female employee.
The man, a manager surnamed Liu from Sichuan province, invited a new female colleague to “discuss work matters” in his office but then told her he wanted to be her boyfriend, the Beijing News, citing a local newspaper, reported.
When she turned him down, he held her by the neck and kissed her. Colleagues called police after hearing her scream.
The man has been sentenced to five months in prison.
Radio “shock jock” Wendy Williams is about to take her highly rated show to TV. The show just started a limited run in select markets to test how well it’ll fare with audiences. But what you may not know about Williams is that she’s currently in the midst of drama related to her former assistant. On March 24 of this year, Williams’ former talent booker/assistant, Nicole Spence, filed a sexual harrassment suit against Williams’ husband, Kevin Hunter [Williams and Hunter are pictured, left]. Among the details of the lawsuit:
Spence, 27, alleges in the complaint that Hunter, 33, harassed her for sex more than a dozen times and created a hostile work environment by repeatedly abusing Williams, 43.
“Mr. Hunter repeatedly sexually propositioned me at work in the most crude and vulgar ways, telling me over and over that he wanted to ‘f*ck’ me,” Spence charges.
Continue reading ‘wendy williams implicated in assistant lawsuit’
When I quit my job from hell, a coworker friend (who was halfway out the door herself) gave me a copy of a book she thought I’d like: Fear and Trembling, by Amelie Nothomb. Nothomb, who is Belgian but spent a large part of her childhood in Japan, wrote the novel based loosely on her experiences in the Japanese workforce. The heroine starts out as a professional at the company and slowly works her way down through the ranks until she finds herself cleaning toilets. It’s well-written, and although the story seems absurd it’s actually heartbreakingly realistic. It’s a book about why work sucks, but it’s also a book about how to find yourself without losing yourself in your job. You can probably find a used copy at the bookstore, as the English-language translation of Fear and Trembling was first published in 2002, and there’s a movie version (but I have not seen it and can’t attest to whether it’s any good).
Remember when you were a kid, and didn’t want to do something, and your mom said ‘a little broccoli/making the bed/math homework never killed anybody?’ Well, sometimes work can kill you, as any of you who read this site can easily attest. The Japanese, who have a word for everything, have a word for “death by overwork.” This word is karoshi and was officially coined in 1987, when the Japanese government acknowledged overwork of employees as a potential cause of death.
The most recent person to die by karoshi was a senior car engineer at Toyota. The man, whose name has not been released, was working on a new hybrid Camry model. The man’s wife’s lawyers said that ”in the two months leading up to his death, the man averaged more than 80 hours of overtime per month.”
Sibi Blazic has been married to the superhot and supertalented Christian Bale for eight years. And how did they meet? Sibi used to work as Winona Ryder’s assistant while Ryder and Bale were filming Little Women. They have a three-year-old daughter, Emmaline. The couples eloped to Vegas just two months after hooking up.
That is all I had to say in this post. Please enjoy the gratuitous photo.
I’ve linked a few times to The Angry Office Manager, but for those of you unfamiliar with the blog, it chronicled the adventures of a real, live, pissed off office manager who worked at a company in Manhattan. The blog, which was funny, sad, and did a great job of depicting the daily life of an office and the people who work in it, has ended. The blogger (who uses the nom de plume “Angry Mandy” and has asked us not to reveal her name–yet) was laid off last week.
Angry Mandy’s last post talks about how she feels about being let go, and I think we can all identify with the feelings of loss, sadness, and weirdly peaceful bliss that she’s feeling right now. After all, we all hate our jobs, but do we really want to lose them before we have a chance to quit? Til then, goodbye Angry Office Manager, and I look forward to revealing your identity someday when you end up with a much cooler gig.
