Words that strike terror into your secretary’s heart:
“I filed it back.”
Please don’t. Please, please, please don’t.
I realize you think you understand our filing system. You don’t. Remember how it usually takes you three or four tries to hit on the proper category on those rare occasions when you have to extract some paper from the files by yourself? Then why do think you magically hit on the proper header when you’re doing the reverse?
Believe me, it is far less trouble for us to spend the fifteen seconds it takes to refile items in the correct place after you’re done with them instead of having to spend a half hour or more searching in increasingly less-likely places while trying to guess what random idea floated to the top of your head when you wandered through the fileroom several weeks ago.
Also-- well, maybe it isn’t your fault. We realize you grew up in the days before Sesame Street. Maybe they hadn’t nailed down a specific alphabetical order then.
Anyway, there are these nifty baskets labeled “to be filed” all over the place: in your office, on the counters outside exam rooms, in the secretarial areas, in the file room itself! Please use them.
We don’t mind filing, really we don’t. If we did, we wouldn’t stay in our occupation. Filing is part of the job you pay us for.
We love you for wanting to be considerate, but…just let us do the filing, OK?
While I’m at it, more words that strike terror: “Where’s that file I asked for earlier? It’s not on my desk.”
Please, when you ask for a file a second time, and we say that we put it on your desk already, please let us riffle through the heaps of paper in your office to double check without getting insulted.
We know you said “it isn’t there”, and we know you believe it, but… The thing is, maybe you just didn’t notice it. Probably it doesn’t match with the mental image you have of that particular file or piece of paper, and so you didn’t spot it. Since we just handled the item when we got it from the files for you, we won’t have that problem.
And it’s unbelievably less stressful for us to discover that sneaky file hiding on your desk NOW rather than after having torn the file room apart for two hours.
Tell you what: if you agree to this one, you can skip the flowers on Secretary’s Day, okay?
Thank you.
“I tried to make some copies but they didn’t come out. Is it normal for the copy machine to smell like something’s burning?”
Boss stops by desk on way to lunch:
“I just found out that I need to fly to Singapore this afternoon and be there maybe three four days and I want to stay at the Regency Hilton and I need to meet Bob Smith-Jones for lunch there tomorrow so can you make those reservations and get me some tickets to whatever’s hot in the theater district in case I have to take him out somewhere and his wife will want to come so better make it 6 tickets in case anybody else wants to come along and I’ll need to have the hotel send up someone with a laptop I can use because my laptop isn’t working right and the last time they sent an IBM but I want a Dell this time and call Bud, Fred, Jeff, Mac, and Stan at Industries Unlimited and tell them I won’t be able to be there tomorrow because I’m in Singapore and call my wife and tell her I won’t be able to make the kid’s soccer game and send Lisa a dozen roses and include a card that says sorry sorry sorry I can’t make your birthday party tons of love from your big pink snugglebunny.”
For the love of all that’s sacred in this world, DDG, please tell us that you did, in fact, shoot his flaming @ss before he made it ten feet away from your desk.
Sure … last minute tranoceanic flight booking, next day major hotel reservation, hand delivered brand-specific-rent-a-laptop, half-a-dozen hot theater tickets, client conference cancellation, miss-the-kid’s-game and oogy Hallmark forgery.
Scrape his skin off with old salt soaked oyster shells after he’s been staked down naked with tightly knotted wet rawhide near a fire anthill and liberally dusted with salt or powdered sugar.
Good lord, yes. Repunctuation, changing words, changing grammar.
Please, there is a reason I have this job. And everything is checked* many times before it goes. If I screwed something up, it’ll be picked up and changed.
Fortunately I now do all my own typing, formatting etc. My productivity rose about 500% as a result. However I now have to keep my own files too. This is definitely a baaaaaad thing. I’m always “too busy” to do it. On the plus side, 95%+ is stored electronically and not in paper format at all, so its not too bad.
In an increasingly computer literate world, the role old-fashioned secretary is surely receding, is it not? I can type 100+ wpm, I know the features of Word almost as well as the features of Excel, learning the company standards is not particularly onerous and I have voice mail if I’m not here. We have two people between 20 of us that do things like book flights, meetings, rooms etc.
Wow, that has to be one of the most incoherent things I’ve ever written. I guess I just disproved my own point.
pan
*of course, one time the head of the whole office in my last company did not check his own letter before it got sent out. The secretary had been also writing a love letter to her boyfriend. One of the paragraphs got switched. You can imagine the consequences. Ho ho fucking ho. Literally.
I’m technically not a secretary but on several occasions I’ve had to fill the slot when the one we have was out, and part of my job is sending out proposals and marketing information. And I’m sorry but there is still a need. I regularly change major portions of my bosses’ writing, simply because if I let something go out the door the way they write it, we as a company would look very unprofessional. I even have a pretty good WPM changing words and correcting grammar as I type.
I have indeed gotten the dreaded “could you please check the flights to [city], I want to go down there over the weekend but check to see if it’s cheaper to go the night before and get a hotel room, or just leave the next day, and I don’t care what time the flight is, but it has to be between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. tomorrow, and tell Delta that they have to match the AirTran price (even though we use a travel agent who checks those things and we don’t call the airline directly).”
I have also gotten the “please set us up with internet postage and learn how to use this label printer to print stamps (even though we already have a postage machine and I really just thought it was a neat gimmick that I won’t ever ask you about once you’ve learned how to do it and showed me the first sample).”
And the “I need that proposal (that I wrote personally on my computer and didn’t follow protocol by saving it to the network or giving it a proposal number, then emailed, I’m positive I didn’t do that but asked the secretary to do it), even though you say it’s nowhere on the network – so just come in here and search my computer for it.”
The most infuriating, however, is the following regular exchange:
“I need all the backup information for this project (which I never gave you in the first place; it’s probably somewhere on my desk).”
“I don’t have any backup for that project.”
“Well, let me know that turns out.”
Yeah, I’ll let you know how my foot feels in your ass.
what i love the most is how new systems that take hours to put into place because the fucknuts can’t take responsibility for their own actions.
recently boss made an ass out of himself asking a client for a piece of paperwork that was received and processed 2 weeks before he made the call looking for the paperwork. there was a note made into the computer regarding the processing, but he felt it wasn’t “clear enough”. so now we need to log in every piece of paperwork that enters the office, as well as log out every piece of paperwork that is on our desk, so that at any time he can look at the notes and see exactly where each piece of paper is at all times.
this process took aprx 2 weeks of manhours to put into place, plus about 1/2 hour every day of every employee.
oh the kicker is that he still doesn’t check the notes and continues making an ass out of himself to customers
I think the key word(s?) here is/are “old-fashioned”. I have been an assistant of some description for over 10 years, and I can tell you that if you can’t keep up with all the new technology, you should probably not choose this profession. We interview people all the time who are proud of their shorthand skills…but can’t use Outlook. They don’t get hired.
I think that now, the trend is moving from traditional administrative secretaries toward more of a coordinator/facilitator role - less filing, more making sure everyone understands their itineraries and that your boss doesn’t forget to sign the checks before he leaves for Bimini with his mistress I don’t want to talk about that <shudder>
I know for a fact that I am the person that my 40-odd engineers come to before anyone else to get things done, because they know that I understand how things actually work better than the management types.
Now, anyone have any idea how to start an airline strike in Bimini?
I’m sure my company would be happy for me to join on secondment. My charge out rate is £250 per hour, but for the sake of a long term relationship, call it £200
Ouch. Not in this company you don’t. One wrong word and we could have a $500 million lawsuit on our hands. You comfortable taking that responsibility on? How’s your professional indemnity cover looking these days?
I don’t want to be a big ol’ meanie or anything and I’m sure your boss is a big bag o’ shite who couldn’t string two words together with a ball of twine. I’ve no doubt that you do your job admirably and the place would just fall apart without you. But should you ever enter my field, be aware that part of my job is picking over with a judge exactly what Paragraph 3.2.4 in a report implied and who decided to do what asa consequence. It would be funny if it wasn’t so damn scary.
Secretary, the printer/computer/copier is not working.
Well, what did you do to it?
NOTHING.
Yeah, right. The machine just decided to fuck up all by itself. And I have to figure out what the fuck you did before I can fix it. If you tell me what the fuck you did and admit the blame, it will take me thirty seconds to correct it.
I would go bonkers as an old-style secretary, but did do an admin stint for a very old-school, middle-aged Cuban partner at a Big 5 firm. It would have been an OK job in principle for someone who wasn’t ridiculously overqualified; “admin assistant” can mean many different things, and I’m rather proud of my various computer and linguistic and organizational skills.
However, I did not bargain for a job which essentially consisted of answering the phone, connecting my boss on conference calls for several hours at a time when he would call in from some Godforsaken South American airport because he couldn’t be bothered to learn to use a Touch-Tone voice prompt system, and print his e-mails because he didn’t understand what the “Enter” button was for. I didn’t even do his travel arrangements, because his Assistant Director did that; I strongly suspect they were carrying on an affair, because they were always very touchy about the travel arrangements. If there were Monday out-of-town meetings, every once in a while I would catch a glimpse of an itinerary which had them arriving middday on Sunday, even if there were hourly flights.
The worst had to be when the midlevel guys my boss managed were in desperate need of some help editing and proofing some client memos, and the Assistant Director had no time to do it for them, although they had to go out that day. (The writers were tax attorneys, but not native English speakers, so we’re talking about checking things like subject-verb agreement.) At the time, I was finishing my M.A. and had several years of court interpreting experience, but the Assistant Director decided I wasn’t qualified to correct legal writing of any sort. Bitch. She’ll get what she has coming to her. She somehow thought it was a better idea to have me do some non-time-sensitive collating instead.
Good God no. I wouldn’t dare to mess with my assistant’s filing system. That would be a deal breaker. She’s crackerjack at what she does and I would suck at it. All hail my assistant (but NOT secretary…she’s strong on that).
I set policy. My staff carries it out. My assistant makes sure the t’s get crossed, the i’s get dotted and I don’t contradict myself too often.
My secretary is a legal secretary and generally has no clue what half the words in my technology related papers mean. I decided a long time ago to do my own typing. I’m a quick typist and rarely need something typed in such a hurry that I can’t do it myself.
I have asked her for train tickets and hotel reservations last minute, though. I apologized profusely. She came through.
I had no idea about the filing thing, though. From now on, I’ll just leave what I need filed on her desk with a post-it note on top.
Words that strike terror in my part-time secretary heart?
“I helped you out by logging all of your inventory.”
Every time this phrase is uttered, it takes me at least an hour to figure it out. Then I have to start over. 63 sets of 3 medications to log into the Excel worksheets that NO ONE can seem to figure out. It’s not rocket science people. If you don’t know how to do it, please don’t try and figure it out yourself.
