Recently, I’ve had some problems with my boss. I’m not an assistant, but I’m a freelancer, which is sort of like being an assistant and not having health insurance. My boss has been late paying me, and that was the last straw. I sent him an email list of complaints and issues he needed to address, and in response I got this:
Read Grapes of Wrath or Schindler’s List. We are fine. It sucks but nothing that we can’t handle.
Not only was that email totally unhelpful, my grandparents are both Holocaust survivors.
- Submitted by Dave, New York City
Hey, we’ve all called in fake-sick on the occasional Friday in order to get a three day weekend. But one guy turned that into an art form. Howard Dean (no, not the former presidential candidate), a New York State prison employee, took off every single Friday for seventeen years. Seventeen years! This man is either a total prick who was robbing taxpayers of their hard-earned money or – probably more likely – my new hero.
The yearlong investigation discovered that Dean, 64, of upstate Locke, routinely submitted — and supervisors at the Department of Correctional Services regularly approved — deceitful time cards with no clue to the weekly furloughs.
Dean “freely admitted” to playing hooky from the state’s Food Production Center in Rome, the report found.
“This certainly gives new meaning to the phrase ‘casual Fridays,’ ” DiNapoli told reporters yesterday.
“He not only dressed down, he didn’t even bother to show up. Quite simply, this is outrageous.”
Look, I’m all for people doing their jobs and shit, but if he managed to get away with it for as long as Zac Efron has been alive, then he alone can’t be blamed. I’m sorry, but at that point there are a whole lot of fingers to point. All hail Howard Dean!
I’m loving (in that “I appreciate its artistic merits” way, not in the “making so little money is awesome” way) this “minimum wage machine” created by artist Blake Fall-Conroy. You can check it out here. This description comes from his website:
The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 5.04 seconds, for $7.15 an hour (NY state minimum wage). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money. The machine’s mechanism and electronics are powered by the hand crank, and pennies are stored in a plexiglas box.
Hat tip: Jen Dziura
Published on
April 21, 2010 in
Contests.
Happy Administrative Professionals’ Day! Or, as your boss still calls it, Secretaries’ Day. If your company didn’t get you anything, have no fear. STA is partnering with DYMO to get you a gift of your own. 50 – yeah, fifty, like five with a zero after it – STA readers will win the LabelManager 260P (see photo, this thing is rad) and a $10 gift card to Starbucks. In order to enter, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post answering the question “What is your daily office lifesaver?” Be creative! STA and DYMO will choose the winners. Responses must be posted by midnight EST on April 26th in order to be entered for a chance to win.
And as if free stuff isn’t awesome enough, DYMO is doing a special code for STA readers who’d like to get a labelmaker from their site. The promo code for 25% off a LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo is STA2010 and it expires on April 30th.
Full disclosure: This is a sponsored post, which means that DYMO is compensating me for running it. Sadly, they are not paying me in labelmakers, just money.
Today, CNN published a list of the ten best paying jobs for women. The jobs – lawyer, doctor, software developer – aren’t particularly surprising, but it’s the breakdown of info on each page of the article (it’s a slideshow) that reveals a less-awesome side to the results. For example, the #1 best paying job for women is, not surprisingly, CEO. I mean, that’s probably also the #1 job for men, too. Then, we get these fun stats to go along with it:
Women’s pay as % of men’s: 74.5%
% of women in job vs. men: 24.3%
Wooo! Thanks for the reminder that women CEOs make more than any other women, but they still make less than dude CEOs! How encouraging. Well, what about other industries, you may ask? Let’s try pharmacists, #2 on the list:
Women’s pay as % of men’s: 75.5%
% of women in job vs. men: 43%
Oh, huh. But that’s clearly just the top two jobs, right? I mean, once we get further down the ladder the ladies’ll balance things out. Let’s try #10, therapist. There are no stats at all. Oh, but there’s a handy link to
this article.
It’s over. We lose. Back to blogging on the internets. I wonder how much guy bloggers make.
This article was cross-posted from TheGloss.
Some celebrities (Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt) have happy, well-paid assistants who are loyal to them for years. Others go through assistants the way that a person with a cold goes through boxes of tissues. Russell Brand, the comedian, sex addict, and fiance of Katy Perry, is one of the members of the latter category. His former assistant told People newspaper (no, not the magazine):
“Russell was very, very high maintenance. He used to walk around in his underpants. Calvin Klein boxers might have done it for me, but Y-fronts certainly didn’t. Some things I was asked to do were nearly impossible. I’ve worked for Michael Flatley and Harvey Goldsmith, but Russell was by far the most demanding. He does go through a lot of personal assistants, I think some have even had mental breakdowns.”
Worse than Michael Flatley? Now that is a burn.
In a poll conducted by Movietickets.com and news-pegged to Administrative Professionals’ Day (which is next week, bitches!), Anne Hathaway’s character Andie in The Devil Wears Prada has been voted the all-time best assistant character in film. While I agree that her character was very relatable and hit a lot of the right notes for me, I always disliked Andie’s (in the book and in the movie) entitlement complex and holier-than-thou attitude. I probably would have voted for one of the 9 to 5 ladies, personally, but I also am hugely biased toward anything that involves Dolly Parton. Apparently, I’m not alone, since Dolly came in second. Here’s the list, clearly written by someone who cared more about using the actors’ names than the characters’:
- Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada
- Dolly Parton in 9 to 5
- Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich
- Gwyneth Paltrow in Iron Man
- Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary
Interesting that all the winners were ladies. Perhaps this has something to do with our culture’s view of assistants as primarily female? I sort of wonder if this list was more of a “vote for the most recent assistant character you can remember,” although the inclusion of 9 to 5 would be the exception. Maybe this is a “which assistant character would you most want to sleep with?” I’d believe that one. Memories are short, and not everyone cares as deeply about people who play assistant roles in movies as I do.
In one of the more fucked-up things I’ve ever come across while running this site, today Steven Seagal was accused of sex trafficking. A woman named Kayden Nguyen is suing the former action star, claiming that she applied for a job as his executive assistant only to find out that Steven defined “assistant” a little bit more like most people define “escort.” From her lawsuit:
Upon arriving to the job, she claims that Steven was also keeping” two young female Russian ‘Attendants’ on staff who were available for his sexual needs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”
Kayden alleges in her suit that though he had these two girls, on the first night of the job, Steven treated her “as his sex toy”, allegedly pushing his hands under her skirt, fondling her breasts and forcing his hand down her pants. Though she complained about the indecency the next morning, it happened again the following day. Along with the sexual assault, she claims Steven forced her to “consume illegal pulls.” [I assume this is "pills."] She is now suing him for over $1 million.
Um, wow. I really have no words. Well, except “gross.” That is one word.
Remember our old friend Kate Major – the one who quit her job at Star magazine because she fell in love with her story subject, Jon “Ick. Nast.” Gosselin and reportedly agreed to work as his personal assistant? Rather than disappear completely, Kate has chosen to stay around and make my life more enjoyable with her wacky antics. Once she and Jon were over, Kate hightailed it over to Jon’s best frenemy, Michael Lohan. Now the gruesome twosome have moved to LA together and are getting married. How can this story possibly get more absurd, you ask? Well, Popeater now claims that Kate used to be Lindsay’s (as in, Michael’s daughter) personal assistant several years ago. Lindsay is reportedly not at all happy to have Kate as her new stepmom and, for once, I totally agree with her. So, let’s see if we can reconstruct the Kate Major timeline…
- Lives in LA
- Works as Lindsay Lohan’s assistant
- Moves to New York
- Works for Star
- Leaves Star, Gosselin fiasco
- Hooks up with Michael Lohan
- Back to LA
- Now.
Something about all of this seems totally off. Now, I like a good conspiracy theory, so here’s mine: this entire thing, start to finish, was planned by Kate and Michael. Maybe they got together when Kate was working for Lindsay, and Lindsay was (rightly) grossed out by her dad hooking up with her assistant and fired Kate. Michael, who has lots of celebrity magazine connections thanks to his career of selling stories about his kid for a living, called in a favor and got Kate a job at Star. They kept seeing each other in secret and when she realized they could make names for themselves by aligning themselves with tabloid magnet Jon Gosselin, they used him as a pawn in their scheme. Man, this is brilliant. And terrifying. I think I need to step away from the computer for awhile.
