a blog for the beleaguered
I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, but after 2+ years of running this site, I had never seen the seminal assistant movie Swimming with Sharks. However, thanks to my brand new Netflix subscription, I finally watched the movie this morning. My initial thoughts (complete with spoilers, so if you haven’t watched it beware) are after the jump.
Continue reading ‘the very belated review: ’swimming with sharks’’
In all the hubbub around Admin Professionals Day, I totally forgot that yesterday was Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Originally planned as a day to introduce girls to the workforce and educate them about career options, some now argue that feminism in the workplace has advanced enough that girls don’t have to be taken into offices to see positive female role models – they’re on TV, at home, and everywhere else.
Brazen Careerist founder Penelope Trunk has a post on her personal blog about how she thinks the day should be be abolished, dismissed as no longer necessary.
This holiday now strikes me as one similar to Secretaries Day, which is a relic from the days when there were no computers and secretaries had thankless jobs and the men who were having sex with them on the side always forgot to thank her in the spotlight for the typing, so there is an official reminder day to buy her a card. That made sense. Twenty years ago.
She makes the valid argument that for many people, there’s no line between work and home anyway, and it seems uneccessary at best and annoying at worst to bring kids into a professional workplace.
As someone who has a Google alert set for the term “personal assistant,” I am very interested in the broadening of the term. ”Personal assistant” contains the word person, and it’s important to remember that because assistants are human beings and need to be treated as such. Turning every new invention into a “personal assistant” a) cheapens what we do, and b) increases the likelihood that bosses view assistants as a commodity. Here’s a list of People and Things That Are Not Assistants:
Are we missing anything else? Post your thoughts, as always, in the comments.
Our parents and grandparents were raised to believe that a college education was the ticket to a life of career success. They raised us to believe the same thing, but by then college was much more accessible and common. Now it seems like everybody goes to college, and you have to do grad school or a fellowship somewhere in order to stand out. Writer Marty Nemko in The Chronicle of Higher Education argues that the college degree doesn’t mean what it used to anymore. However, he feels that part of this worthlessness has to do with the fact that college degrees are expensive and sometimes take more than the prescribed four years to get. See if you agree or disagree by reading the article here.
I was thrilled to see yesterday’s New York Times profile of one of my favorite blogs, Jezebel. The site, which covers “women’s issues” (everything from motherhood to fashion to celebrities to politics) in a smart and non-condescending way, got its first big rush of publicity last summer, when they paid an anonymous source for a photograph of Faith Hill posing for the cover of Redbook magazine. They compared the original photo to the heavily Photoshopped one that made the actual cover, and used the two photos as a jumping-off point to talk about the way the media distorts images of women.
Redbook’s editor in chief, Stacy Morrison, is understandably annoyed with Jezebel for making her magazine look stupid. Rightly, she criticizes them for paying for the photo, which is a somewhat questionable journalistic practice. But it’s not enough for her to stop there.
“Encouraging people to steal proprietary information was a somewhat dubious beginning, but I get it,” she said. “Gossip is fun, which is probably why all the assistants look at Jezebel.”
Oh, I’m sure that only the assistants at your company look at Jezebel. Because only assistants like gossip. Yeah, right. I actually had some sympathy for you until you had to tack on that slam against Jezebel via slamming assistants. In your mind, assistants are “fun” and “like gossip,” which is your not-so-subtle magazine editor way of saying it’s fluffy, light, and dumb, just like you think assistants are.
No, the real reasons assistants read sites like Jezebel are because a) it’s more interesting than the soulless work you probably make them do, and b) they often discuss feminism and workplace politics, which might inspire them to find jobs that don’t involve working for people like you.
Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald recently covered the MTV Awards and Australia Fashion Week, which caused millions of famous people to descend on the smallest continent. Most of the first half of the article talks annoyingly about entourages and which rappers had the biggest posse following them around. 50 Cent had 20 people with him, for example. But here’s what the article had to say about paw-print-tattooed rapper Eve:
Female rapper Eve appears to be on a budget, opting to travel here with only her manager, her bodyguard and personal assistant, a small posse she refers to as her “family.”
Um, really, guys? It seems you’re missing the point. We should be commending celebrities who don’t need a well-paid army of soothsayers to shield them from the world at all times, not snarking on them for paying uneccessary money for friends. It’s great that Eve a) might be choosing to spend her fortune on more practical things and b) is reducing the size of her herd. Maybe she’ll be able to someday go out in public alone, thus setting a precedent for all rappers. We can only dream of this future, and the last thing we need is the Sydney Morning Herald doing its part to set back the cause of the un-posse.
Many assistants fall victim to Stockholm Syndrome, which is when they start blaming themselves for their boss’ mistreatment and internalize their office issues. For many people, SS begins as part of some bigger issue. In my case, for example, I had a deep need to please. I was a great student in college and was really eager for my boss to like me as much as my professors had. When he didn’t, I convinced myself it was because of my own personal failings and didn’t take into account the fact that he treated everyone like dirt, not just me.
Many who have workplace Stockholm Syndrome grew up actively involved in sports and have retained their athletic spirit and competitive drive. This sad post on Jezebel discusses a recent post about young girls involved in Olympic-level gymnastics. Although a coach is not a boss, this passage made us think otherwise:
Ryan talks about Julissa Gomez, a girl who looked “ten years old even at fifteen. She stood 4 feet 10 inches and weighed 72 pounds.” Gomez is a gymnastics cautionary tale: at a competition in Japan in 1988, she did a dangerous vault called the Yurchenko. According to one of Julissa’s teammates, Chelle Stack, said, “You could tell it was not a safe vault for her to be doing. Someone along the way should have stopped her.” But no one did, because the Yurchenko meant higher scores. Gomez hit her head on the vaulting horse during warmups at such a speed that she became paralyzed. She died of an infection three years later.
Scary stuff, and proof that Stockholm Syndrome isn’t always a result of working in an office.
Happy day-after-Admin Professionals Day. I’m sure you’re exhausted from the huge party your company threw in your honor and still hungover from all the fancy free cocktails that were sent your way on golden platters. Or not.
Anyway, just had to share this comment on that post that came from a fake email address and was signed only “RCL”:
There’s a big difference between a maid and a personal assistant. And neither is a profession.
There are so many fucked up things going on in those two sentences that I barely know where to start. But I’ll try.
First of all, how many personal assistants have had to serve as de facto maids/housekeepers/nannies to their bosses? A LOT. Take this one, this one, and this one for examples.
Second, a “profession” is defined as “a vocation or business.” That’s kind of clumsy, so let me translate. A profession is a longterm job that you do because it enables you to earn money. And for a lot of us, being an assistant is precisely that: a thing we do for a couple of years, whether it’s one or four or thirty, because it pays the bills. So, you’re not just wrong, you’re grossly ignorant.
[I warned you guys about the whole no-bread-makes-Lilit-grumpy thing. I just didn't realize the grumpiness would take the form of extended manifestos.]
In an editorial on the website MercuryNews.com, Patty Fisher defended the rights of domestic workers, saying, “Behind every super-successful two-career couple, there’s a person who makes it possible for them to work such long hours and still come home to a clean house, clean laundry, freshly scrubbed children and home-cooked meals. Call her the maid, the nanny or the personal assistant. Whatever you call her, she belongs to one of most exploited professions in the country.”
Behind every great person, there is a great assistant. Behind every board meeting that goes off without a hitch and behind every conference call with eighteen participants that results in an international merger, there is an assistant. The executives may get press for signing a contract, making a deal, or winning a sponsorship, but there would be no article without an assistant to get the boss on the phone.
Where would companies be without that person whose job it is to get soaking wet running back from Starbucks on a rainy day with a dozen espressos? What would happen if every copy machine in America jammed, and there was no assistant who knew how to fix them? How would any bosses be able to do all their work without a trusty assistant to fact check, screen their calls, and order in lunch?
Assistants in this country don’t just deserve a holiday. They deserve a whole fucking lot of respect. And this website is here to give it to them.
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