… and the results are pretty spectacular. Hat tip: Rebecca Rose.
Tag Archive for 'Saved'
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.
If you’re going to quit, you should quit with a BANG. That’s what one assistant named Jenny did. Jenny was transferring a call one day when she overheard her boss calling her a HOPA (that would be Hot Piece Of Ass, and that would also be sexual harassment). So she quit in hilariously spectacular fashion. You can view the whole photo essay at The Chive.
Update: So the whole thing was a scam. At least it was an amusing scam!
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.
In a huge victory for two assistants in particular and a small victory for all assistants everywhere, Varsha Sabhnani of Long Island was sentenced to 11 years in prison. The wealthy woman and her husband, Mahender, were convicted of several charges, including “forced labor,” for treating two maids like slaves. Samirah and Enung, who are both Indonesian, were essentially trapped at the couple’s mansion. Among some of the atrocities they had to endure:
The victims testified that they were beaten with brooms and umbrellas, slashed with knives, and forced to climb stairs and take freezing showers as punishment. One victim was forced to eat dozens of chili peppers against her will, and then was forced to eat her own vomit when she couldn’t keep the peppers down, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors contended the accusations amounted to a “modern-day slavery” case. They said the maids were subjected to “punishment that escalated into a cruel form of torture,” which ended in May 2007, when one of the women fled early on the morning of Mother’s Day. She wandered into a Dunkin’ Donuts wearing nothing but rags, and employees called police.
Congratulations to Samirah and Enung, whose awful boss finally got her comeuppance. On behalf of all assistants I hope you move on to better opportunities and better treatment. Thank you for speaking out and calling attention to the employee abuses that still exist in our country.
Megan Hustad’s new book How to Be Useful does a great service to all job-seekers. A fan of “success literature” and self-help books, she goes through fifty years’ worth of job advice and pulls out the most useful parts. In addition to giving you tips you can actually use, Hustad analyzes the genre of career advice books and looks at what these books tell us about our lives, our culture, and the way we percieve ourselves as workers. She agreed (politely, of course) to answer a couple of questions from us. (She also agreed to donate some copies that we can give away to you guys, so stay tuned for an upcoming contest.)
STA: How long were you an assistant?
MH: I was an editorial assistant at Vintage Books (and the Knopf Group, more generally) for two plus years. No promotion prospects there, so I made a lateral move to another company, where I toiled as an “assistant editor” for another year plus before becoming full editor.
STA: What mistakes do you see assistants make?
MH: A lot of assistants know, deep down, that they’re the hamsters of the organization. By which I mean, management’s attitude is often “Well, if this one doesn’t work out, or dies — no worries. We’ll get another one and no one will know the difference.” Assistants are eminently replaceable. Say I walked off the Vintage job during my lunch hour — they could have filled my spot with someone equally capable, if not more so, by the end of the day.
The problem for assistants then becomes: How to deal with this cold, hard fact? When people are lined up around the block for your job? That’s where the big mistakes come in. It’s a mistake to try to gain advantage by making sure your superiors feel how unique and brilliant you are. Trying to dazzle the boss…just rarely works out well.
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!”
