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.
Jessica Ward was laid off from her job in the Seattle area last December. Like many of us who have been laid off recently, she was initially angry and hurt. But within a few months she came to realize that getting laid off was one of the best things ever to happen to her. Being unemployed gave her the motivation to start a business she’d been thinking about but never acted on, spend some quality time with her kids, and rethink her notion of what a successful career was. Jessica then wrote 
Hi all, it’s Lilit here.
Julie Jackson is the editor of 
What if all the horror stories on the site had happy endings? They’d be this column, “Saved,” where saved assistants tell how they finally saw the light and inspire you to do the same. This edition was submitted by reader Helena in New York.
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