Meetings are weird things, and often they’re a breeding ground for embarrassing workplace behavior. Because of the sheer amount of boredom in the room, there’s always someone chewing on a pen, doodling, spilling coffee down the front of their shirt, or forgetting to turn their cell phone off. Well, Us Weekly has decided to share one of the most embarrassing meeting stories ever - for some reason, they deem a story about Jessica Simpson farting in a meeting to be worthy of attention on their website. I almost didn’t post about it, but I decided that it’s worth pointing out that Us Weekly is really grasping for straws. I love celebrity gossip as much as the next girl, but come on. It’s not like she pulled a Paula Abdul and answered her cell phone during a meeting. Sometimes people fart. It’s involuntary and they can’t help it. I mean, for fuck’s sake, leave the woman alone. If she says or does something, we can judge her behavior, but what’s next - an article about how she sneezed while someone was trying to ask for an autograph?
Tag Archive for 'Horror Stories'
I’m really digging the new blog Please Fire Me. It’s a simple enough premise: users submit reasons why they’d like to be fired. However, the reasons are about how much their companies/bosses suck, not about something the employee did. And, as any savvy assistant knows, being fired is way better than quitting, because then you get unemployment benefits! Here are a couple of my faves below:
Please fire me. I have to share my workspace with the mistress of the boss. So she thinks she’s the queen of the company and she definitely can’t do anything wrong in the boss’s eyes. And that leaves the rest of us in the office treated like dirt. So please fire me!
Please fire me. I had no idea I’d have to spend hours every day photocopying entire textbooks because you are too cheap to buy extra copies.
Please fire me. I just spent 20 minutes on the phone with your OBGYN picking a birth control that is “better suited” to your body.
Please fire me. I think I just helped my boss cover up a drunk driving hit and run with a mailbox.
And there’s more where that came from.
2009 has been an interesting year in assistantland. Here are some facts and figures:
The most popular post of 2009 was actually a post from 2008 - the post where I announced that Kathy Griffin’s first assistant, Jessica Zacijek, was leaving her job. The #2 and #3 posts were from this year, and they were also about the Jessica/Kathy situation.
The most popular tag of 2009 was “Office Politics.”
The most popular category of 2009 was, as it has been every other year since the site launched, “Horror Stories.” Refresh your memory with the story of the office Halloween grinch and a boss who earned the nickname Miranda Priestly 2.0.
The most popular celebrity of 2009, after Kathy Griffin of course, was Christian Bale. His former assistant Harrison Cheung’s tell-all to the Mirror and the story about Bale’s wife being the former assistant to Winona Ryder made him a popular guy on STA. The gratuitous hot photos probably didn’t hurt his ranking, either.
The most controversial post of 2009, by a landslide, was a post about Susan Boyle getting her very own assistant. Some really militant Susan Boyle fans - some of whom had the same IP address - thought it was impertinent of me to suggest that Susan should be nice to her assistant.
As for my own personal favorites, my new favorite tag is “Post Ideas from My Mom.” My mom is a regular reader of the site and occasionally sends me links to things she thinks I should write about here. Lots of them end up on the site, such as this story about a secretary who got fired for eating the boss’ sandwich and this post about a Texas office who adopted a cat as their mascot.
Thanks for a great 2009, and I look forward to an even better 2010.
Tyra Banks announced yesterday that her self-titled talk show would be ending this season. That announcement was reportedly news to the show’s crew, whom she neglected to inform separately. Many of the show’s crew were from L.A., where the show had originally been based before Tyra worked out a deal to get more money for herself if the show was in New York. [In case you're wondering, she did not offer additional pay or moving expenses for the crew who opted to move cross-country with the show.] Now, several former employees have dished to the New York Daily News about Tyra’s reign of terror:
“There had been high turnover of employees for years,” a past crew member says, insisting that many people quit after just a few months because it was “pretty difficult to work for Tyra.”
“She and the higher-ups on the production staff could be extremely brutal,” the source says. “She really is a diva.”
“When the show moved from L.A. to New York, several staffers weren’t even directly told about the change - they heard through the grapevine that it was going to move locations. Even so, a lot of those people gave up their lives on the West Coast so they could continue working for the show. Now they’re out of luck.”
I thought in spirit of today’s post I’d pull some old Tyra-related stories, including the one about the truth behind her “apartment makeovers” and this one about a former assistant suing her. Enjoy!
My mom sent me this post from AOL that collects user-submitted workplace horror stories. Here are a couple of particularly horrible ones:
On Administrative Professionals’ Day (formerly Secretarys Day) all of the support staff got taken out to lunch by their bosses. My boss told me to make sure to save my lunch hour for her because she needed my help with something. I thought maybe just maybe she was going to surprise me by taking me to lunch to celebrate the occasion and thank me for all of my hard work. Even when we pulled up in front of her house I thought she may have fixed a nice lunch at her place. Nope, she just needed me to help her put flea collars on all six of her cats. - Submitted by Nancy
My worst boss owned a printing company. He was trying to attract a new client. The client was a catholic seminary. The day before the client visit, my boss hung up crosses all over the company from the front door to the bathrooms. - Submitted by Karen C
The worst Boss we have installed microphones (bugs) in our cubicles so he could listen in, when we figure out the hidden microphones we started talking in codes or tune in a small radio and tune it to all talk station this drove him nut’s, he took the radio away but we still talk in codes till he got fired for being drunk on the job. (Yeah) - Submitted by Jimi
It was to be a steep run-up to the conference deadline. Documents had to be perfect; presentations perfect; flights perfectly aligned; passports current. Margery thought she had all of her ducks in a row and all boxes ticked, thanks to her trusty and hard working staff, including yours truly. However, as the date approached, her demands came thick and fast. Also gathering traction was her enormous personality disorder. Let’s say that Margery came pre-packed, with steamer trunks full of “issues”. Being a psychiatrists wet dream, she would often take great delight in reducing staff to tears, for the slightest thing, such as the fax machine running out of paper. Many a note was placed on her personnel file.
Nevertheless, one day, after a particularly troublesome morning battling with subway delays and trying to find a teller machine in torrential rain, I had just about had enough. Her phone rang and as she was not at her desk, I picked up the call. The person on the other end was equally as rude and bad tempered, as Margery. Seriously, Margery was so bad tempered she would have been rejected as a contestant for the Jerry Springer Show. However, she proceeded to bellow through the office, “Well!!!, Who is it???” My reply, “Your Parole Officer. They want to know if you have tried to take your ankle tracking device off again!”. This started the ball rolling for a vehement onslaught from her, up to and including the day that she was to leave for the conference. Fortunately, I was feeling in a particularly strong mood and was determined to not have Margery derail me.
“Karma, karma, karma”, I chanted under my breath, along with “Bring it on, Bitch!”, as I pondered whether I should put ground-up glass in her coffee. Unfortunately, Karma didn’t come during those final weeks, but her departure did, which brought an air of peace on the whole company.
Workplace harassment is no laughing matter. A current lawsuit going on in London absolutely made my blood boil:
Jordan Wimmer, a 29-year-old financier who earned more than $1 million (Cdn) last year, is in the midst of $7 million suit against Mark Lowe. Lowe, 59, is the principal at hedge fund Nomos Capital and a legend in London investment circles. He owns a castle in France and has a reported $200-million fortune.
Testifying in front of a London employment tribunal this week, Wimmer accused Lowe of peppering her with sexual innuendo, making her watch lap dances and forcing her to share office space with prostitutes he passed off as relatives.
Let’s read that last sentence one more time, shall we? Forcing her to share office space with prostitutes he passed off as relatives. OK, there are so many weird things about that sentence. First of all, why would the prostitutes need offices? If they were, uh, working as prostitutes then they probably would have needed bedrooms, not offices. If they were doing their work in the office, then did Ms. Wimmer have to watch them have sex? That is some fucked up shit right there.
Wimmer said the poisonous atmosphere ruined her health. She told the tribunal that she was speaking slowly because of medication she was taking for depression. She claims to suffer from bulimia and anxiety as a result of working at Nomos.
I don’t know either of these people personally and had never heard of them before reading this article. That said, I almost always believe an underling over a boss, because it’s much harder for an underling to get away with lying in a corporate environment. This is one lawsuit I will definitely be following.
Once again, here’s another one of those “reporter shocked to discover that some people are less-than-completely-nice to their employees” articles. This one comes courtesy of the Telegraph and reports that many secretaries and assistants in the UK have to do personal tasks for their bosses, even when it does not fall under their immediate job description. Such tasks include:
- Bathe her boss’ elderly mother
- Help with the boss’ kids’ homework (translation: do it for them)
- Mend the boss’ clothes
According to Rosemary Parr of a “PA training firm” called Global PA Network:
“The perception of the role is stuck in a time warp from 40 or 50 years ago when secretaries were seen as surrogate wives or housekeepers. Now they are more like management assistants - they need to be their managers’ second brain, anticipating what their bosses want next as well as doing what they want now, but what our research has shown is that they are not getting the recognition for it.”
This shouldn’t shock anyone who has ever actually worked as an assistant. Right, Joan Holloway?
The office manager at my company loves to do corny decorations for holidays. This year she did a whole Halloween thing with orange streamers and cutouts of ghosts and stuff. In the break room, there were a whole bunch of paper tombstones on the wall. My friend and I got a sharpie and wrote names of people who got laid off this year on all the tombstones. When my boss saw it, he was REALLY MAD. We all had to go to this big meeting where he and the office manager yelled at us and told us how us writing names of laidoff people on the tombstones was bad for morale. Funny, I thought actually laying people off was the part that was bad for morale.
- Submitted by Aaron, New York City
I work at a busy music booking agency and we have a variety of characters in the music industry calling in. There are three of us who answer the phones, one of us started 3 months ago, myself who started not even 2 months ago, and another who started 2 weeks ago. The guy in question reps one of our artists who is barely working, but he also represents an A list pop starlet, so he thinks he is above being nice to assistants. This week all the assistants got a mass email from my boss:
Hey all you on the front lines of the telephone answering;
Got a mild complaint from Redacted’s manager, Redacted. When he calls, he would prefer to not be asked who he is. He was peeved that in order to get through to my office he was asked who he was. That you took the care to screen my call is great, so I have no complaint. But do your best to make sure that you remember his voice in the future, so that he does not experience that discomfort again and have to share his feelings with you directly.
Boss
- Submitted by Gloria, New York City