… and the results are pretty spectacular. Hat tip: Rebecca Rose.
Archive for the 'Saved' Category
As much as I love horror stories, I love nothing more than a good reader submission about throwing off the assistant yoke forever. Thanks to longtime reader Helena for sending this one in – and mazel tov!
I got an assistant job so I could be creative on the side. I was a permanent temp at a large company. I loved my job and was continually given more responsibility. I thought I would be hired as a permanent employee as I was valuable beyond my assistant title. That did not happen thanks to my extremely bitchy boss that not only made my life miserable but stood in my way to be hired.
I decided life was too short to get bitched at on an hourly basis without benefits. I found another job, as a combo Office Manager/Executive Assistant for a much smaller company in the same field. I was told I could move up within a year or two. It was a young company, so it was pretty much a guarantee. I liked the job and my co-workers at first. I had a lot more freedom and the lack of micromanagement was nice. It didn’t last long. It started slowly paving the long road to office hell. I wanted to move up so I decided to stick it out. Maybe it was better on the other side. I was the only assistant and they promised help once the company grew. Then they started hiring more employees and gave me more responsibilities with no help. They refused to get on the small office bandwagon and help out as needed. Instead they got pissy when I tried to explain that I couldn’t do everything for everyone at once. Clearly I was hiding all those extra hands in my blazer.
I had to ask to use the restroom, making sure the phones were covered while I was gone. I didn’t eat lunch until three or sometimes four o’clock. For months I didn’t leave the office at all, spending 12 straight hours at my desk. My creativity went out the window, along with my personal freedom. Every time I made plans after work or for lunch with friends I had to cancel because at the last minute there was a project thrown at me so I had to work through lunch or work late. Eventually I stopped making plans with my friends altogether.
I kept telling myself that it would be worth all the shit I took and the death of my personal life when I finally got promoted to do some of the things I loved at my previous job. After a year and a half of working my ass off, I realized that they didn’t care how hard I worked. Nothing was good enough for them. The people in the position I wanted worked all the time too, even on vacation. That was not the life I wanted. I didn’t want to be a slave to my job. I didn’t want to pay my hard-earned money to go to the beach and spend all my time at the hotel working. I needed a new job and a new city. I was making plans to move when I found out I had a serious illness that would require at least a year of expensive treatment and had to stay put. I couldn’t change my insurance after the diagnosis. I had to stay until I got better.
I let my boss know that I was sick and that it would really help if we could get another assistant part-time, intern, or whatever for our growing office. He refused, and I got four new people to be responsible for instead. I spent more time at the office instead of taking care of myself. If I got everything done and left on time once in a while I got yelled at. It was a very difficult year. Deep down I knew I was not going to get better unless I started taking care of myself.
One day I realized that 2 or 3 years had turned into 4. I did not want to be an assistant for the rest of my life. I didn’t even have a life. I was finally in recovery from my illness after I started leaving on time when I could. I knew this lifestyle was holding me back from complete recovery. I was never going to be promoted and I didn’t want to be. There was no reason to live in New York if I didn’t have the energy to enjoy it. So I gave my notice and moved home for a while.
It was the best decision I’ve ever made. I feel so much better. I am taking the time to do some things I’ve always wanted to do. My health comes first. I am looking into other careers that do not involve living at my desk. There are so many things I love to do and life is too short to spend it doing something you hate.
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 an open letter to her former boss, which appeared in BusinessWeek, thanking him for laying her off. Among other things, she writes:
We thought this layoff would be a crushing financial blow and opted to hand-make all of our Christmas gifts. They were a huge hit with our family and friends and we spent several wonderful days together as a family creating them. We didn’t at all miss the experience of circling the mall for hours looking for a parking spot. The kids didn’t sit on Santa’s lap at Macy’s but we did run into him at a neighborhood ice hockey game and snapped a photo. I’ll mail you one.
We wrote out our household budget for the first time ever, and we stuck to it. I wrote a business plan to start my business, and my husband encouraged me to restart the freelance writing career that I’d put on hold six years ago when I got married. Now I work only part-time for myself and I write part time. I never commute. My wonderful kids are thriving. And as for that student loan payment I wasn’t sure I could make in December? I paid the balance of the loan off in full in February, three years ahead of schedule.
We love to hear stories about former assistants who done good–after all, we have a category called “Saved” for a reason. And here’s a perfect story: STA Official Girlcrush Kelly Clarkson worked as an assistant twice. Although she was listed as a “cocktail waitress” during her stint on American Idol, Kelly worked as both a zoo assistant and a pharmacy assistant before hitting it big. I have a friend who worked as a zoo assistant, and while I’ll spare you the details of her job I’ll just say that I never realized how much shit can be generated by a single animal. I guess that job prepared Kelly for dealing with Simon Cowell on a regular basis.
Anyway, we’ll close with this quote from Kelly: “If I can wake up everyday before I die and know that I don’t have to serve anyone food or drinks, I will be happy!”
Yeah, we know, Thanksgiving isn’t til Thursday. But with so many people off or leaving early tomorrow, we thought we’d go ahead and post a little early.
Top Five Things For Which We Each Are Grateful:
Ashley:
1. One-Year Anniversary of STA, thanks largely to Lilit
2. Workplace Distractions like Ask a Ninja (turn your cubicle into a cubi-kill!) and the Fugs
3. Turkey, and the tryptophan-induced haze that follows
4. Having the whole week off from work
5. No longer working in a Black Tower of Death (the building our former workplace, The Evil Empire, was located in)
Lilit:
1. Being responsible for stuff other than “Refill boss’ coffee mug again” and “Make 2,000 copies by hand”
2. Saying at cocktail parties, “I run a blog about people who hate their jobs.” Especially since the response is usually: “Oh my God, I have to tell you this one story about my boss…”
3. The excuse to watch at least a dozen different Thanksgiving-recipe-related shows on the Food Network.
4. All the assistants who have been saved in the past year.
5. The fact that my and Ashley’s former place of employment still has Save the Assistants blocked from all their company computers. It’s like this old expression…”If they’re shooting at you, you must be doing something right.”
Bonus thing we’re both thankful for: You guys. Yes, you. The ones whose eyeballs just moved over this sentence. There would not be a Save the Assistants without the assistants who write to us, send us horror stories or funny links, enter our giveaways, and email us when they quit their jobs. You guys are the reason we love checking our email every morning and the reason we even update this site when we go on vacation.
Christine has been on STA almost as long as we have, and we were incredibly proud when she finally quit her nightmare assistant job. We sat down with her to ask about what finally inspired her to quit, and what other assistants can learn from her experiences.
STA: Tell us a little bit about the assistant job you had.
Christine: I was an administrative assistant. I did everything that of course wasn’t in the job description. I was so excited to have the job after looking for one for a long time.
STA: Why did you want to leave this job?
Christine: I just got burned out. This was my first real job and I knew that there were more things out there for me to do. I didn’t want to be glued to a desk the rest of my life and then look back and say, I could’ve done this or that.
Continue reading ‘meet christine, an assistant saved’
