Ever worked for a company that let people bring their pets to work? I did, and when my cubemate brought in his cocker spaniel it made my whole day more interesting. Well, one office in Corpus Christi, TX, has the right idea. When an employee of the J.C. Elliot Landfill found a cute kitten among the garbage, he brought the kitty (named, appropriately, Elliot) back to work. Elliot is now the “office cat.” If you click this link about the story, you will find both an adorable picture of Elliot at work on his computer and a good Office Space joke. In the meantime, I’ve decided this is an excellent excuse to post one of my favorite kitty videos. This is really going to improve the quality of my Monday.
Monthly Archive for September, 2009
Page 2 of 3
Supermodel Elle “The Body” Macpherson is so beautiful that, apparently, everyone is mesmerized into wanting to be her personal assistant. Sara Paxton, one of Macpherson’s costars on the new series The Beautiful Life, said in an interview:
“I become Elle’s personal assistant – when she’s around, she’s so beautiful, I’m like ‘Elle, would you like the fruit platter?’ ‘Elle, cheese plate?’ and they’re like, ‘Sara, you’re in this scene, calm down’.”
“I forget sometimes what I’m doing,” she continued.
Man, supermodels must save so much money by not hiring assistants and instead just letting people be transfixed by their beauty and thus desire to wait on them. I should try that technique.
Anyone who’s worked in an office can tell you that assistants are the rulers of the office – their titles may not make it official, but we all sees what happens when an assistant leaves for a day and the whole place goes to hell because no one else can figure out how to use the telephone. But what happens when an assistant really is royalty? Enter Peggielene Bartels.
Bartels, a native of Ghana, works as a secretary at the Ghanaian embassy in Washington, DC. But one morning her whole life changed:
The 90-year-old king of Otuam, a town of 7,000 residents an hour’s drive from Ghana’s capital, had just died, the caller said. The king, as it happened, was Bartels’s uncle. The town elders had performed a ritual to choose his successor, praying and pouring schnapps on the ground and waiting for steam to rise as they announced the names of 25 relatives. The steam would signify which name the ancestors had blessed as the new king.
Bartels, the caller said, was Otuam’s new Nana, with power to resolve disputes, appoint elders and manage more than 1,000 acres of family-owned land.
Bartels divides her time between Washington and Otuam. She’s even personally funding repairs to the royal palace in Otuam. Here’s to Peggielene – and her kickass work ethic. If I found out I was now royalty, I’d probably not even make it ten minutes before quitting my job, but 55-year-old Peggielene still goes into work and keeps on keeping on.
It’s never fun to report the death of an assistant. Last week, longtime assistant Michael Davison, who worked for Warren Beatty, Barry Diller, and Nicolas Cage, was killed in a car accident while on vacation in Hawaii. An obituary in the Hollywood Reporter referred to Davison as “one of the most experienced and respected personal assistants in the entertainment industry.”
STA’s thoughts are with Davison’s family.
Bee Shaffer, the daughter of Vogue editrice/notorious boss Anna Wintour, is just like a regular person! She may get to join Mom in the front rows of fashion shows, but she took a less predictable route by studying theater at Columbia University. Now that Bee is out of school, she’s applying for jobs – and, oddly, hasn’t had much luck. Yes, it turns out that the recession affects even the daughters of legendary magazine editors. According to the New York Daily News:
The 22-year-old former Teen Vogue contributing editor went on a staggering 24 interviews since graduating from Columbia in May – all of them unsuccessful.
Part of me wants to be all bitter and “well, I sent out easily 200 resumes without getting a single interview, so suck it up already,” but part of me is also like “man, if it’s hard for this girl, imagine how bad it is for everyone else.” I think it’s safe to say that no one likes the job search process, especially when it’s your first job. Going on dozens of interviews and not having any of them pan out is embarrassing and disheartening. [I think Post Grad covered that fairly well.] Repeated job rejection getting to be a universal human experience, and that’s pretty depressing.
So, good luck, Bee, and I admire that you’re choosing a career other than the one where it would be super easy for you.
This weekend, the New York Times did its weekly “A Night Out With…” feature about Rex Lee, best known as Lloyd the long-suffering assistant on Entourage. The Times followed Lee and several friends as they went to the hugely popular restaurant Koi in Los Angeles. Some choice selections:
Seated at the head of a table decorated with an orchid and a bottle of low-sodium soy sauce, Mr. Lee played host to six friends, most of whom he worked with when he was an assistant to a commercial casting director. After dinner, everyone would walk to Mr. Lee’s nearby condominium to watch the latest prerecorded episode of “Project Runway.”
After four years of playing Lloyd on “Entourage,” the frazzled, gay Chinese-American assistant who suffers the homophobic and racist insults spit out by his manic boss, Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven), you might think Mr. Lee would be tired of melodrama. But that’s exactly what draws him to “Project Runway.”
What a cutie. Team Lloyd!
Having an evil boss doesn’t just hurt morale and your will to live – it’s also bad for the economy. A new study from USC’s School of Business finds that bad bosses cost the US economy about $300 billion a year. That is a lot of money. Where does it come from?
- Lawsuits – wrongful termination, harassment, creating a hostile work environment… you name it.
- Lost productivity – people bitching about their bosses, hiding from them, crying in the bathroom, etc., instead of working
- Retention/hirings and firings – employees are more likely to leave jobs with unpleasant working environments (note: the Evil Empire went through about ten assistants a year. That is a lot of time devoted to reading resumes, arranging interviews, making offers, training new people, and the like.)
- Morale – not just unhappy employees, but if clients, vendors, or customers get wind of how unhappy a place is for workers, they are 80 percent less likely to continue their business there
In other words, you now have a really strong case for getting your boss fired. Good luck!
Justin Timberlake isn’t content just to do music – he and Trace Ayala have a clothing line called William Rast, he’s a popular guest host on Saturday Night Live, and now he’s launching his own line of tequila, 901 Silver. But when a guy has so man projects going on, how will he find time to run his own company? Timberlake has put out an ad seeking an “Executive Vice President of Big Ideas” for 901. Perks include a $25,000 signing bonus, a VIP trip to Las Vegas, and “the opportunity to possibly get coffee for other 901 employees” (read the fine print, people).
To enter, you need to make a video pitching a “Big Idea.” Check out the entry form for more info.
Fashion is a notoriously competitive field to break into – that’s why people are still willing to work for crazy bosses like Kelly Cutrone and Anna Wintour. However, it may be so competitive that even famous and/or rich people have to do grunt work. First, Tallulah Willis toiled away as an intern guest of the editors at Harper’s Bazaar instead of simply being handed a job or a column. Now, the New York Times reports that even famous Korean pop stars still have to start at the bottom:
Let us take the example of Sang A Im-Propp, who was a pop star in Korea before she decided, while on a business trip to New York, that she wanted to be in fashion. This was nearly a decade ago, and Ms. Im-Propp’s command of English was tenuous, but she enrolled at Parsons and in short order found herself an internship with Victoria Bartlett, a noted stylist and designer whom she admired and hoped would introduce her to the glamorous world of design. Instead, Ms. Im-Propp found it difficult to understand Ms. Bartlett’s heavy British accent, and at first she thought she had misunderstood just what Ms. Bartlett was asking her to do. Get cupcakes?
Not just any cupcakes, but the glossy butter-cream confections from the Cupcake Cafe, which is a four-block crosstown walk from Ms. Bartlett’s studio through the dodgy garment district, and it was freezing outside.
“It made me cry a lot,” Ms. Im-Propp said. “Vicky is an amazing artist, but she can be difficult.”
Could it be that fashion is actually becoming a great equalizer? I’d be a lot less demoralized about having to fetch coffee if the other lackey fetching coffee was a pop star. I’m just saying.
