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Yesterday, my high school crush, Rivers Cuomo, was hospitalized after the tour bus he, his wife and daughter, and members of his band Weezer were traveling in got into an accident outside of Albany, NY. According to New York magazine, “the vehicle slid on a patch of black ice, ran through a guardrail, and dropped about ten feet into a ditch.”
Rivers has three cracked ribs, and his assistant Sarah Kim fractured two ribs and a lower vertebrae. Although those injuries are no laughing matter, I’m glad to hear that everyone is (mostly) OK. Assistants, we should keep a vigil! Or at the very least, send poor Sarah some snacks that will taste better than that hospital food.
I think it might be time for me to go listen to Pinkerton on repeat.
Bee Shaffer, the daughter of Vogue editrice/notorious boss Anna Wintour, is just like a regular person! She may get to join Mom in the front rows of fashion shows, but she took a less predictable route by studying theater at Columbia University. Now that Bee is out of school, she’s applying for jobs – and, oddly, hasn’t had much luck. Yes, it turns out that the recession affects even the daughters of legendary magazine editors. According to the New York Daily News:
The 22-year-old former Teen Vogue contributing editor went on a staggering 24 interviews since graduating from Columbia in May – all of them unsuccessful.
Part of me wants to be all bitter and “well, I sent out easily 200 resumes without getting a single interview, so suck it up already,” but part of me is also like “man, if it’s hard for this girl, imagine how bad it is for everyone else.” I think it’s safe to say that no one likes the job search process, especially when it’s your first job. Going on dozens of interviews and not having any of them pan out is embarrassing and disheartening. [I think Post Grad covered that fairly well.] Repeated job rejection getting to be a universal human experience, and that’s pretty depressing.
So, good luck, Bee, and I admire that you’re choosing a career other than the one where it would be super easy for you.
I’m all for assistants banding together and helping each other get out of scrapes. So on one hand, the Seraphic Society, a secret fraternity-esque alliance of assistants to some of the most high-profile executives in the world, seems like a good idea. The members, all based in the New York City area, are able to call on each other with help regarding everything from referrals for private jet companies to tips on the proper way to introduce a diplomat. Beyond the usefulness, though, the Seraphim (“seraphim” are a class of angel, btw) operate in a weirdly cloak-and-dagger fashion: for example, each member is given a white leatherbound book containing the names and contact information of the other members.
Are the Seraphim a close-knit group of people with stressful jobs, or a bunch of people who make themselves feel important because they work for people who are important? I can’t decide. Also, there’s some gender stuff going on here – there are no men in the club (there was one before), but this probably has more to do with the continuing practice of male bosses/female assistants that pervades through corporate structure despite being hopelessly out of date than it does with the Seraphim’s own preferences.
The CNN article about the Seraphim does make some good points – they’ll seem obvious to us, but they’re good observations about the difficult nature of the assistant job. Multiply the typical assistant job (and salary) by ten, and you’ll get some idea what it’s like to work for a Fortune 500 company’s CEO:
A high rate of unemployment and a low rate of new hires tends to result in people becoming increasingly competitive and desperate to find a new job. It’s one thing to become really proactive and apply for every job in sight, even if it isn’t in your field or might be a step down from what you were doing before, because you need to have a regular income. But it’s another thing to spend money in order to try and land a job. One “expert” believes that plastic surgery is on the rise, despite the challenging economic times, as people try to look better in order to stand out from the competition:
The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery reports that, among last year’s most prominent trends, about two thirds of its members reported seeing men and women who requested cosmetic surgery because they wanted to remain competitive in the workplace.
“In the corporate world, there’s a lot of emphasis on image, and image goes with self-confidence,” says Antonio Armani, a Beverly Hills, California, cosmetic surgeon who specializes in hair transplants. “I think a lot of people do invest money in improving their looks because they feel this is one way they can go up the corporate ladder.”
Such procedures included breast implants, tummy tucks, teeth whitening, and hair transplants (coincidentally, all the exact procedures that Jon and Kate Gosselin got!).
Maybe some people ascribe to the “you have to spend money to make money” philosophy, but I can’t get on board with this. Sure, ageism exists, but I wish we as a culture would spend more time combatting the origins of ageism than going along with it and mutilating our bodies in order to conform to some arbitrary standard of youth and attractiveness.
The British Trade Union Conference has suggested that stiletto heels should be banned at workplaces in the United Kingdom. While I’m not more on Team Ballet Flat than Team Stiletto, I’m not usually interested in creating office dress codes. This one, though, is kind of interesting – the proposal isn’t about telling women how to dress and imposing gender norms on them, it’s about, oddly, making them comfortable.
From their proposal:
The motion, tabled by the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists, states: “Congress believes high heels may look glamorous on the Hollywood catwalks but are completely inappropriate for the day-today working environment.
“Feet bear the brunt of daily life, and for many workers prolonged standing, badly fitted footwear, and in particular high heels can be a hazard. Around two million days a year are lost through sickness as a result of lower limb disorders.
“Many employers in the retail sector force women workers to wear high heels as part of their dress code.
“More must be done to raise awareness of this problem so that women workers and their feet are protected.”
While I don’t think banning high heels outright is necessarily the way to go, I do like that they don’t put all the blame on women – I have several female friends who work in offices where high heels are mandatory, and this is a ridiculous, outdated idea put in place by male bosses who want women to conform to a certain visual standard. I think the Congress makes the excellent point that this silly request from some companies is actually really harmful to womens’ health in the meantime.
Almost every college has a career center, although whether the center is any good totally depends on the place you go. Mine was mediocre – they mostly just had books of sample resumes and cover letters that you could copy and an online database of internships in the area. When it came time to actually find and keep a job, I was on my own.
One recent graduate, New Yorker Trina Thompson, is suing her alma mater, Monroe College in the Bronx, claiming that they didn’t do enough to help her find employment when she finished school. Thompson graduated with a degree in information systems with a 2.7 GPA this April and has not been able to find a job since then. She’s suing the school for $70,000, the amount she spent on tuition.
I, for one, find Thompson’s lawsuit pretty absurd. For one thing, she’s been looking for a job for less than four months. It took me about eight to land my first full-time gig, and that was in a way better economic situation than the one we’re in now. Almost no one walks into a job the day that they graduate from college, and that’s why they should save money and plan ahead for the time they’re going to be unemployed. It amazes me that Thompson thinks she deserves to get her tuition back after such a short period of time. Even if her college career center totally sucked ass and wasn’t helpful at all, what exactly has she been doing? How many interviews has she been on? I sent out several hundred resumes before even landing my first interview – it takes patience and a lot of hard work, not giving up after a couple of months and demanding your money back. I bet her ulterior motive is to get her name in the news and hope someone offers her a job after the barrage of publicity. Ugh.
Hi everyone, it’s Lilit here. I’m back from spending three weeks in Israel on a fellowship. It’s the longest I’ve ever been away from STA, and I had some major withdrawal. Luckily, the awesome triumvirate of Ashley, Garrett, and Heather were here to take care of STA in my absence. They did a great job and I’m so happy to count them as friends and co-conspirators. Not only that, but I’m also happy to get back to work. So expect a ton of posts over the next couple of days as I get over my jet lag and get back to my obsession with all things assistanty.
bernie madoff assistant
As a reality TV junkie, I’m used to fellow junkies trying to come up with explanations/justifications for their habit. One common answer is that humans like to watch people who are in worse situations than us so that we can think to ourselves “At least I’m not trapped in a horrible relationship with Spencer fucking Pratt” and thus improve our own self-esteem. Over on Beliefnet, blogger Hillary Fields discusses her feelings about the Bernie Madoff scandal, admitting that she got a little joy out of knowing that a former evil boss of hers had been a Madoff client:
Could I be remembering it right? I recalled thinking at the time that the enormous profits she’d been reaping (I couldn’t help peeking while I was photocopying, though I tried not to) seemed far out of line with what the market was doing at the time, though I was no expert.) Thinking about it, I was pretty sure my mean former boss was indeed a client of the world’s largest Ponzi schemer.
And I was feeling pretty gleeful about it.
Would you share a similar feeling of schadenfreude? Or would you manage to dredge up some remorse for the person who screamed at you and called you names? I can’t say I would take the high road, honestly.
Save the Assistants isn’t really a blog about kids (I mean, unless your kid is your assistant, which happens sometimes), but every rule needs a chance to be broken. Actor Chad Lowe and his girlfriend Kim Painter (formerly the personal assistant to Carrie Fisher) welcomed their first child last weekend. The little one was named Mabel Painter Lowe. The couple has been together since 2007. Congrats!
