But you actually are a Personal Assistant. I am a professional administrator, with the training and experience and specialized knowledge that comes with that. I expect my professional training to be held in as much respect as the professional training of other professionals in the office. Not to get off on too much of a tangent, but I suspect the male administrative professionals don’t get nearly as much of this kind of attitude as the females do. The “get the girl to do it” kind of attitude is lingering somewhat.
Oh, as for the Executive Assistants, I mentioned them in my previous post. Everyone is correct, EAs will do just about anything an Executive requires. They do pay extremely well for people who are suited to them; I just don’t happen to be.
I would also like to add that I now have my own assistant, and I would probably get fired if I asked this person to do many of the things I did when I was someone’s assistant. That is the difference between being a mid-level manager (me) and a president (my former boss).
Just a nit. There are circles where that word is not antiquated but is, in fact, accurate. My secretary, for example, feels demeaned if she is referred to as an “administrative assistant.” She is not an administrative assistant, she is a legal secretary, and woe betide the person who does not give her her due in that regard.
missbunny, that sounds like the job I did as well. And I could have kept doing it, but was offered the opportunity to do systems administration. Exec assistants do quite well, there are financial benefits and a lot of fringe perks (you often travel with your exec, he often gives you the “gifts” he doesn’t want). You do need the temperment to be willing to babysit a grown adult, and a healthy dose of “whatever he does that makes him worth a million dollars a year to this company, if I keep him doing it for ten minutes longer a day than he would without me, its adding value…even if that is picking up his drycleaning.”
The bad jobs are the “Devil Wears Prada” type jobs - assistant jobs in industries were you get paid garbage to get treated like garbage because its the only break you are going to get in publishing, Hollywood, advertising, whatever - and where the prick proportion is pretty high. Fortunately, most Fortune 500s aren’t like this, no one really wants to “break into” software development or manufacturing (at least, not by being someone’s personal assistant), and the legal department is there to make sure there isn’t liability in how you are treated.
I guess what I was getting at in the OP was errands that benefit the boss but not the company, like taking his car out to have the oil changed. The secretaries here run the office parties and keep the common areas neat and organized, tasks which may be unfulfilling and possibly frivolous but are actually sanctioned by the company. It takes a tremendous and twisted ego to assume that everything that benefits me also benefits the company, therefore the company should hire someone to drive me to work, for instance.
It seems like personal favors from the secretary at company expense are a step down the road to expecting the company to be responsible for your total happiness and viability, which is what CEOs are always saying is expressly not the responsibility of a company, when they’re laying people off. Where do you draw the line? If the company will pay for your personal footservant, why not your gas bill, too? It strikes me as medieval.
NB: I am fully aware that most top executives of big corporations get precisely this lordly treatment. I was just wondering how foar down these attitudes go.
Agreed - but “legal secretary” is a specific job with understood (in the legal world) duties. It’s not an AA, nor a paralegal: it’s a legal secretary and every lawyer knows the difference between LS and secretary and the Managing Partner’s EA.
Dangerosa: I do the sysadmin here too - which is why not only do I not like being called “secretary” - but AA or EA doesn’t fit either. I’d like to see the average EA do what I do. I have an admittedly unusual job structure and no title really fits.
I don’t see a certain amount of personal work as “favors” - they are done to make the executive have more time available to work on work. But I do understand how many people would not want to do them. As for how far down do they go, the only person at my firm who gets any personal work done is the CEO. No other officers do; they don’t even have assistants of any kind. At most companies, I would say that middle management usually doesn’t dare to ask for personal work. It’s not required and not requested. The higher up the executive, the more personal work might be expected. I usually only see it at the CEO/President level - not EVP, certainly not VP.
I work as a legal assistant in a large corporate firm (mostly because while I enjoyed the academic satisfaction of studying law, the thought of being a practicing attorney gives me hives).
In my firm, the degree of personal (as opposed to business) errands one can expect one’s assistant to perform is based on two things. First, the level of the person doing the requesting. Associates and junior partners are not expected to request anything other than purely business errands of their assitants (or legal secretaries - depending on which they have access to). If they do make personal requests, it’s pretty much up to the secretary to decide if she is comfortable granting the request. It’s a personal favor - and treated as such by all concerned. At the senior level, some degree of personal errand-running is expected. This is one reason why those secretaries get paid more. The degree of personal errand-running is negotiated between the attorney and the secretary though.
Then again, a legal secretary is a different sort of thing than a regular secretary. Being a legal secretary is a specialized skill in and of itself.
There are partners at my firm who expect personal errands from their secretaries that it makes me cringe to think about. Up to and including managing medical decisions for the partner. However, those secretaries are very highly paid individuals who have negotiated what they are expected to do very carefully.
That’s a good way of putting it. As an administrative professional, I do NO errands that benefit the boss but not the company. If the boss needs his errands taken care of, he needs to hire an Executive Assistant (or Personal Assistant) who will do exactly that. Or re-negotiate my job to include these duties, and probably replace me when I quit.
Aangelica, do you enjoy working in the legal field? I’ve always steered clear of legal admin work because of a bad experience as a temp at a law office - I’m used to being treated as furniture as a temp, but that was particularly bad.
I’ve picked up lunch for my boss a couple of times, but it was - not an emergency, but a situation where it wasn’t like I felt like the errand lackey.
We’re in a different time zone than most of his counterparts/superiors, and every now and then they schedule a conference call right smack during our lunch hour. I can think of maybe 3 times he’s asked me to just grab him something while I was out, and he either pays me back ASAP if he’s low on cash, or gives me his money before I go. It’s really not an inconvenience, either - we’re in a part of town where there’s a McD’s, BK, Wendy’s, etc., at pretty much every intersection.
Other than that, I think the only ‘personal’ thing he’s ever asked me to do is email his wife his frequent flyer number when his laptop went bananas one day.
I was an AA for years, and I got lunch for one of the consultants I supported. I didn’t mind because he didn’t abuse the favor, and he always bought me lunch also when I did this for him so I was happy to oblige.
My secretary offers to get me coffee and, when I used to eat it, lunch. She also mails almost all my stuff, too. It’s par for the course around here, so it’s no big whoop.
I wouldn’t dream of asking her to get my dry cleaning or pick up my groceries.
My mother, who was not a secretary (I think her job title was “mathematician” or some such), used to be expected to pick up lunch for her (male) boss, in the late 60’s. I don’t know if it was part of her job description, but he expected her to do it.
He played cards at lunch with some coworkers, and she would bring him a sandwich from a local sandwich shop while he played. Every day, he would complain that the sandwich wasn’t spicy enough. Every day, she would ask the person at the sandwich shop to make the sandwich spicier, but it was never spicy enough for him.
One day, after she asked the person at the sandwich shop to make the sandwich spicier, he said, “Are you trying to play a joke on someone?” She said “No, it’s for my boss, and he always complains that the sandwich isn’t spicy enough.” The sandwich-shop guy said, “I’ll give you some hot pizza peppers and you can put them on yourself.” Which he did, and she slathered them on. (Note: I don’t know what “hot pizza peppers” are or were) She did this in good faith- the boss was a guy who, when he went to Chinese restaurants, put so much hot mustard on his food that the waiters would warn him that it was spicy, and he would say “I know, I like it that spicy”.
She took the sandwich back to the office and gave it to him while he was playing cards. He took one bite, and jumped up so quickly that he upset the table, sending cards flying everywhere. He ran down the hall, put a quarter in the soda machine, and drank a can of soda in one gulp.
He never asked her to get lunch for him again. She continued to work there until 1974 or 1975, shortly before I was born (after which she became a stay-at-home mom).
When my boss asks me to pick up lunch for her, personally, she always buys me lunch too. So yes, that’s a personal one but it’s not like you feel hard done by in executing it. Bosses of the sort swampbear seems to be are a joy to work with.
Honestly, if she wanted me to pick up her drycleaning or whatnot, I’d be quite okay doing it. It all comes down to attitude. If a manager treats you in a manner that makes it clear they know you’re doing them a favour (ie, they don’t take the attitude that you’re there merely to service their whims) then you’re more likely to go above and beyond the call of duty if required. 
Let me clarify that for ya. When she picks up lunch for a meeting, etc. she gets one for herself also at company expense. So, while she is picking up lunch for me, so to speak, she gets a free lunch too. I figure that’s only fair.
Bites When Provoked thanks for that. Respect goes both ways, I feel. I no more feel it beneath me to pour my assistant a cup of coffee than she feels it beneath her to do the same for me. Matter of fact, I was the first person she called when her husband died, cause she knew I’d be there. She drove 2 and one half hours one way each time to attend the funerals of my brother and my father just to show her support. We both care about and respect each other. In my mind, that’s how it should be.
I work as an admin assistant for a Fortune 500 company. So I support a VP and a big group of her reports and her reports’ reports.
She makes it mandatory for me to pick up her lunch, and coffee, at least once a day. And help with her refinancing, drove her to our other office location, pick up her glasses, mail her personal stuff, go somewhere to fix her (personal) iphone, etc. She is this Diva who thinks she’s much bigger than she actually is, and totally abusing her position for personal gain.
Just recently she started getting involved wih a non-profit organization, and guess who has to follow up on stuff - me.
I worked for an executive before as an EA, and would do personal stuff, mostly as a favor for them, and I gladly did so. It was a ‘scratch my back and I scratch yours’ situation. My situation right now is more ‘scratch my back every 5 minutes, or else!’.
Too bad the job market is not great right now, otherwise, I would have left a while ago.
a good office manager can do all of that and i have, with the exception of the boss’s dry cleaning and the like. i also preferred the variety of not being stuck in the office each and every day, day-in day-out.
it was common to get a call at 9 in the morning and be asked to get a lunch catered for a dozen people by 11. you rolled with it - and kept a very up-to-date takeout list at hand.
I am currently in the process for being interviewed for several Executive Assistant positions. I have worked these types of jobs on and off for the past two decades.
In many cases there is a fine line between EA and PA (Personal Assistant) and the jobs for which I am applying has a very nebulous line between the two. In my last position – for a trust-fund playboy – my job often involved way more than most assistants would ever agree to in a job: cleaning him up after a night’s drunk, procuring “escorts” for him, arranging events that involved questionable activities (and substances).
It also involved international travel arrangements (and packing for him for those trips), being on-call 24/7, and managing his entire business affairs.
In going out on interviews now, when I explain what I have done in the past, it usually involves the fact that – with this job market – I am likely to do anything to get the job done and if that involves helping the boss take care of personal matters, than so be it. It is just part of the job.
My admin assistant gets things such as coffee/lunch when I have visitors, guests, etc. She will set up the food, and clear the aftermath. On rare occasions, when we need an errand run to a local store, we send a security guard who does some light driving as part of their job.
Once in a while, if I am locked up on a long call, I will send her to the vending machines to get me a drink or even have her order me some food and then meet the delivery driver.
I don’t have an individual admin but rather share her services with the other group managers. I’ve sometimes asked her to fetch my lunch, but always with the understanding that I am paying for hers as well. The exception would be when I buy lunch for my team; I’ve asked her to pick that up. But that’s not a personal errand.
My son’s sister used to have the department admin job. I’d ask her to do things like pick up dry cleaning, but that was because she lived with me at the time and I was giving her a ride to work. I didn’t consider that a job function.