What’s the best way to improve a situation you hate? Just add a cute animal. Case in point: when the phone just won’t stop ringing, this kitty goes and answers it. Talk about talent. Cats may not be great with printers, but it seems like their phone-answering skills are a bit more on track.
Monthly Archive for November, 2009
There are tons of ways to calm down/feel less stressed at work – taking a break to chat with a coworker friend, listening to music, organizing a company yoga class – but poetry isn’t one I normally think of. A new website called Fiscal Haiku encourages readers to submit haikus about the economy and the current financial climate. Here are a couple of my favorites:
Food court smells so good
But my wallet is empty
It sucks to be broke
Pour water through seives
Wanting and spending money
Yet life can’t be bought
a college degree
can’t afford health insurance
unpaid internship
This is fun! I might have to work on some STA-related ones.
If I had been running this blog eight years ago, I would have definitely written about Jane Andrews, the Natavia Lowery of her day. However, former celeb assistant Andrews (she spent nine years working for Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson, the Duchess of York and mom of Princess Beatrice) didn’t kill her boss – she murdered her former boyfriend, Thomas Cressman. Instead of hitting him with a yoga stick, she hit him with a cricket bat.
Andrews was sentenced to life imprisonment. Today, British authorities announced that Andrews has escaped from the prison she was being housed in. She was not present for the daily 8 AM roll call and a search for her began immediately.
In other news, Jane Andrews’ name makes me think of the real Jane Andrews, one of Anne Shirley’s chums from the Anne of Green Gables books. Case in point: this is where I landed after typing “Jane Andrews” into Wiki.
Sometimes life really does imitate art…well, not that “Entourage” is art, but you get the idea. Just as his character Lloyd is mocked on the show by being called “The Gaysian,” his portrayer Rex Lee also gets shit from crew members while on set. Lee admitted to TMZ that he’s sometimes a target of jokes about his race and sexuality at work, and that it bothers him.
After the story broke, “Entourage” creator Rob Ellin responded that he was “horrified” to hear of Lee’s on-set harassment. He said that when the show resumes filming he’ll be giving everyone a lecture (sensitivity training class, perhaps?) and insisted that “[Harassment] is not something condoned or acceptable.”
I’m glad to hear that Ellin is laying down the law (even going so far as to say he’ll fire people who make homophobic comments), but did it really have to take this long? How many years has Lee been on the show? Is this a recent problem or something he’s just speaking out about now? Either way, I’m glad that Ellin seems to want to do the right thing.
Remember when Conan hired a zombie to be his personal assistant on The Tonight Show? Well, he’s keeping the bit going – and mocking Twilight in the process, which is always fun. Enter the brooding vampire, the hot werewolf, and … the sexy mummy?
Being an assistant is a fine art. So when Trinette Faint was working as Matt Damon’s personal assistant, she realized she could be really successful starting her own assistant company. That company, Faint Services Group, works to provide short-term personal assistants to celebrities who are shooting films on location or will be in a town for a specific amount of time and need help while there.
But that wasn’t enough for Trinette. She just won the Fabulous At Any Age contest, which is sponsored by Harper’s Bazaar and Estee Lauder and awards a $10,000 cash prize to aspiring beauty entrepreneurs. She’s using the money to start a new line of haircare products, which she’ll sell on LoveHue.com. The site will launch in a few weeks, after Thanksgiving.
Congrats Trinette, and way to light a fire under some of the other aspiring ex-assistants out there.
Goldman Sachs, one of the only financial giants to remain standing, has decided to take the conservative approach and cancel their annual holiday party. The move is hardly shocking, as many companies in a variety of industries have also cancelled their parties, either because of financial reasons or because it would look tacky to have one when the economy is doing so badly. However, Goldman is going one step further in its party-banning, telling employees that they can’t throw their own parties for coworkers at their homes:
The firm has canceled its annual holiday party, just as it did last year. It also instructed the smaller business units that they should not organize their own smaller parties, which had been a long tradition at the firm. The parties are banned even if no firm money goes to pay for them.
But Goldman employees were surprised to hear that even parties within private homes fall under the ban. The firm apparently believes that it would be inappropriate for its employees to be seen partying while the economy is still so shaky and unemployment is so high.
Man, companies trying to keep you from having fun even when you’re not on their time? Next they’ll try to tell you what the dress code should be when you’re lying in bed on a Saturday morning watching TV. Or they’ll issue appropriate protocol for how to behave on your next date.
One day, a man named Dustin Curtis tried to book an American Airlines flight via the company’s official website, aa.com. A computer programmer and designer, he was horrified by how complicated it was to use the website. Rather than just being pissed off, Curtis published a post on his blog explaining how he would redesign the AA.com site to make it more efficient and user-friendly. The next day, he got an email from a designer at the company. Among other things, the email said:
The group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out amongst many different groups, including, for example, QA, product planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project planning, and user experience. We have a lot of people touching the site, and a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its content and functionality. Fortunately, much of the public-facing functionality is funneled through UX, so any new features you see on the site should have been vetted through and designed by us before going public.
However, there are large exceptions. For example, our Interactive Marketing group designs and implements fare sales and specials (and doesn’t go through us to do it), and the Publishing group pushes content without much interaction with us… Oh, and don’t forget the AAdvantage team (which for some reason, runs its own little corner of the site) or the international sites (which have a lot of autonomy in how their domains are run)… Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that AA.com is a huge corporate undertaking with a lot of tentacles that reach into a lot of interests. It’s not small, by any means.
Curtis printed parts of the letter on his blog, but left the employee’s name and position anonymous. That wasn’t good enough for pissed-off AA executives, who searched their employees’ emails until they found the culprit. The employee was then fired. They did have a good reason – namely, that the employee violated the Non-Disclosure Agreement he had signed promising not to disclose details of the company’s operation – but many believe that firing the employee was an act of spite.
Remember, kids: this is what happens when you tell people the truth about the lame bureaucracy at your job. What can we learn from this? Two things: one, if you’re going to respond to a blogger or customer who has some complaints about your department, do so from your personal email account; and two, don’t fly American.
When crazypants Kate Major, who left her job at Star magazine to date reality “star” and father of eight Jon Gosselin, I thought she was completely making up her story that Jon offered to hire her as his personal assistant. However, it seems I owe Ms. Major an apology: in a lawsuit against Gosselin by TLC, the network that aired Jon and Kate Plus Eight and claims he violated his contract with them, one piece of evidence is a handwritten employment agreement between the two. In the document, Gosselin says he will pay Major the same amount of money she was making at her previous job to be his assistant. According to today’s New York Daily News:
The secret contract, dated July 28, 2009, reads: “I, Jon Gosselin, will employ Kate Major as a personal assistant,” pledging to give her “some but not all future accounts.”
Gosselin also wrote that “she will receive a percentage of accounts for payment based upon involvement.”
Major also promised in the newly revealed document, to “run any media inquiries past Jon Gosselin before doing any on-air or print work.” She likewise pledged to give Jon approval over questions and to exclude questions he nixed.
Major has been subpoenaed to testify in the case. This is getting good. I wonder if TLC will summon Michael Lohan as well?
Sad news from the Associated Press newsrooms around the country – Gawker is reporting that almost all of the company’s editorial assistants were let go in a round of mass layoffs yesterday. One tipster told them:
I was one of the editorial assistants let go. I was told it was a business decision to let go nearly all editorial assistants. Some in cities of regional desks will be reassigned to handle EA workload there.
That’s sad to hear – not only for the people who got laid off and lost their livelihoods, but for the remaining employees, who will probably have really intense combo jobs to deal with. And I’m willing to bet that the people with said combo jobs probably won’t be getting raises or title changes to compensate them for all the additional work they’re doing.
All in all, I feel sad for all those people – the employed and the unemployed. Save the editorial assistants!
