Melissa Plaut was like many of us: she had a couple of random jobs, including a memorable stint as a beleaguered assistant at Miramax. After a few years of the working life, Melissa had had it–she quit, and ended up as a New York City taxi driver. She began blogging her experiences, and those experiences have been turned into a book, Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do With My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab, which was published by Villard Books this summer. She agreed to sit down with STA–over diner food, of course.
STA: Can you tell us a little bit about your job history?
MP: I worked at Miramax in the late ’90s. I started as a concierge–getting water for people, getting coffee, picking up packages. Then I was an assistant for a music agent. It was crazy. I’d get kept until 12 at night and then bitched at about my overtime. After I left, my boss was let go.
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Published on
October 16, 2007 in
Saved.
STA reader Amanda just quit her terrible assistant job, and has thankfully offered to share her goodbye letter with us. Enjoy her tasteful-but-funny exit letter below:
I find it impossible to make a 1,2,3 ranking of the reasons as to why I am leaving my position at X company and X division. My reasons, of which there are far more than three, merit equal consideration; furthermore, it is impossible to accurately account for my decision in the absence of a close examination of each reason’s closely interrelated affect on its preceding and following ones. To wit, the big picture:
I believe one root cause for leaving lies in a deep dissatisfaction with supervisors, who presented very little opportunity for me to grow. This in turn led to dissatisfaction with my job responsibilities and a concurrent lack of recognition among superiors (barring of course notice for grievous errors like failing to deliver the correct condiments for the lunches I frequently delivered). Without career-track job responsibilities and recognition, there exists limited advancement opportunity.
Running on a parallel track is the fact that this job does not pay a living wage for a New York City resident, nor does it apparently offer standard cost of living raises as those at the bottom of the company’s feeding chain received $300 bonuses in lieu of raises in the 2007 fiscal year. Furthermore, many employees work investment banker hours (I must admit this does not apply to me, as I have come to believe work, if divided equitably among coworkers and done efficiently, can in fact be completed in eight to 10 hours time), leading to a work/life imbalance.
When these reasons, along with the realization that the industry’s direction—rife with layoffs and doom and gloom forecasts—lead any intelligent individual to:
Return to school
Change careers
Start their own business or freelance
Currently, numbers 2 and 3 apply to my situation, though 1 is not out of the question.
Published on
September 13, 2007 in
Saved.
Meet Jane. She’s an STA reader who just saved herself from a shitty assistant job. However, she’s still coping with the lingering effects of Stockholm Syndrome. Below, she shares her story.
I have just, in the last hour, received a dream job offer and given notice at my assistant job. I should be breaking open the Veuve Cliquot. Instead, I feel like disloyal scum. I worked for a large higher education institution, let’s call it Anonyversity. I’d taken a temp position there a year ago when I’d finished up graduate school, followed by a month-long stint at an arts festival and needed to make some money quickly while I looked for a job in my field. I have an Arts PhD (insert ‘Doctor of Fuck All’ joke here), something I’d hoped to put to use as a lecturer and researcher. But, the job market is filled with arts PhDs, and though I’d had many interviews I’d not yet secured a teaching position. Since I’d always done office work, temping made sense at the time.
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Published on
July 11, 2007 in
Saved.
The name of our website is Save the Assistants. All the horror stories, tips of the week, and various items we post lead toward one ultimate goal: we want to save some assistants. We want to get you away from that asshole boss, into a job that challenges you, or into an unemployment that makes you really damn happy.
That’s why we’re happy to profile Josie Hawk, an STA reader who did the ultimate good deed: she saved an assistant. For that, we’re presenting her with our first-ever Save the Assistants Medal of Honor. Josie’s rescue was in the form of finding a new job for a beleaguered assistant.
Josie agreed to sit down with STA for an interview.
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