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Thank you for this thread! I've been Admin for 15 years, starting as an innocent, wide-eyed Receptionist and working my way up to jaded and fed up Executive Assistant with temping inbetween. A few tales for now. I worked for a few years at a Graphic Design and Printing company, small, privately owned and competing with places like Kinko's and Staples and The Printing House in the print end. We had one major client and stacks of smaller clients. The company was run by a man who was the worst micromanager I have ever had the bad luck to run into. I started out as Fulfillment Assistant in that company, working on shipping out POS items across North America for our one major client. One day I came into work to find my computer was utterly hosed up. Turned out that one of the utter idiots in Accounting had received an email with an attachment that appeared to come from the company's bank. She forwarded it to Big Boss Man, who thought it most wise to forward said email to my email address, go to my computer (which had been left on for defrag overnight), since I had a PC and he had a Mac (don't ask, cause I don't know) and OPEN THE loving FILE. Broke my computer and let a virus run through the entire system. I just lost it on him, as did the IT Manager and my direct Manager. Somehow managed to keep my job. Still at same company, during the massive East Coast blackout. I live in Toronto, during the blackout, Municipal, Provincial and Federal government was begging anyone who was not part of Essential Services to stay home. So, I did. (by this point I was Pre-Production assistant in the Printing end of the company). When I came back into work after the power was fully restored to the city, Big Boss Man tore me a new one for obeying my elected officials during an emergency, and I tore him one back for running the loving presses when I had NO power, no food, no money for three days, despite what government and emergency services was asking everyone to do. I essentially equated him with the strip joints on Yonge Street who were also up and running during all this. Oh, and my married name is German, although I myself come from an Anglo-Irish background. My husband's family emigrated to North America (first the US, then up to Canada) back in the 18th century. Big Boss Man was Jewish, and his father was a Concentration Camp survivor. For some reason, his father came in and puttered around the office once a week. Once he learned what my last name was, he had it out for me in a big way. Big Boss Man also had a bad habit of hiring qualified people to do a job, and then prevent them from actually DOING said job. Like the sales guy he hired because of his ability to bring in major clients. However, Big Boss Man did not want to do anything that potential clients wanted to do to decide on us as a vendor. And then poo poo on the sales guy for not bringing in the million dollar clients. He also cut the Graphics department down to essentially two people and threw a shitstorm if they dared to work on any client project that wasn't the one major client we did have. Oh, and then there was the time he wanted me to help out sales with cold calls, and gave me the list for Quebec. I don't speak a word of French. He knows this. He also would ask me to do something, then poo poo on me for not reading his mind and making changes or adjustments that he thought of but never told me. Thanks to him, I now demand any and all requests be emailed to me in detail, any changes or adjustments emailed and I save the drat things for years. I hate that man so very much. Temping? Let's see, once I got contracted out to a major insurance company, essentially to fill a desk while the bigwigs from the US head office came in for two weeks. I had more than a few positions where they somehow decided that it was more cost efficient to temp out the entire admin staff on 6 month contracts, and then bring in a brand new temp admin staff at the end of that 6 month cycle. One of these places was a major Canadian Mutual Fund company. (This same company also had a Financial Advisor who came to me three days into my contract with a loving shoebox filled with 6 months of expense receipts, crumpled, faded, stained with coffee and next to nothing to tell me what I was supposed to code the poo poo under) Wow....that's long. More later I suppose.
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Apr 21, 2010 23:17
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Auracounts posted:I absolutely detest professionals who believe that being abusive towards others is some sort of entitlement you receive along with their degree. I've essentially reached a point where I no longer even give the impression that I'm bending over backward to meet their outrageous demands. Can't give me enough time to get something done? Don't be surprised when it's not done within your imaginary timeframe. Yelling at me will not make instant adjustments to time and space. They will only cause me to move anything you ask me for to the very bottom of my priority list, no matter what it is.
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Apr 21, 2010 23:22
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Millstone posted:Cool! Passive-aggressiveness is definitely the way to a successful career, rear end in a top hat. It's called following corporate policy, not passive=aggressive. I suspect you are one of those very types he's bitching about. edit: beaten
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Apr 21, 2010 23:40
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Umbilical Lotus posted:I'm one of those God-complex secretaries people complain about. To be fair, when you control every aspect of several peoples' schedules, are the first face the client sees on entering the premises, are directly responsible for what the entire company ingests, breathes, is supplied with and knows, giving you the power to misdirect, agonize, and subtly kill every single employee should your omnipresent mind decide... ahem. It requires a certain kind of mind. You either kind the kind, comfortably commanding mother hen, you get the quietly competent nerd, or you get The Fuhrer. I think I'm too young to be the first on that list. Yes, yes and YES! (Well, I go home and knit, but still.....). I fall between Quietly competent nerd and The Fuhrer, depending on where the sun is in the sky or how much I'm getting poo poo upon at any given moment.
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Apr 21, 2010 23:50
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Millstone posted:The fact that the manager is his manager should be a loving clue? Ummm....nothing in his post even mentions that it was a manager who made the request, never mind it being his manager. Maybe you need to learn to read? And it still isn't passive aggressive. It's called FOLLOWING POLICY. (nice edit to save yerself. Policy still needs to be followed or poo poo hits the fan.)
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Apr 22, 2010 00:08
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Here's a little tale from my current position. I work for a Management Consulting firm (and no, I still am not all that sure exactly what that is, and I've been working for them for about 6 years now). About a year ago we went to a virtual office situation (everyone works from home, YAY!), so this tale stems from the 5 year period where I worked in a traditional office. I am the Executive Assistant for 4 partners, as well as Admin for all the consultants (about 10, give or take, consultants seem to come and go). This tale concerns one of the partners whom I refer to as The Pathetic Partner. The Pathetic Partner is, I think, in his early to mid 60's. However, for many, many years he was a drunk. He is also stupid in general. Drinking didn't help his IQ. He's also the most passive aggressive son of a bitch you'll ever meet. He essentially was asked to become a partner years ago when the company was set up because he gave the founding partner his first job eons ago. A pity position if you will. My first week there we were working on a huge proposal to a huge Sector Council, my task with proposals is to work closely with the Project Manager and bringing all the pieces of the proposal together (read - format the drat thing and make it look good and be readable). The day the proposal is to go into the hands of Purolator to be delivered, I had proofread, formatted, prettied up and gone over the thing with a fine tooth comb, printed and bound and was in the process of packaging the entire thing up for the courier. Enter Pathetic Partner. He wanted to see the proposal in which he had zero part. So, I gave him a copy, told him I needed it back within an hour as the courier would be here then. I got it back 45 minutes later, marked up with 'grammar corrections' (which were not errors in the first loving place!). In a panic, I showed it to the Project Manager and my immediate boss (the senior partner/president), and was told to just print out and bind a fresh copy and not worry about it. Pathetic Partner did this all the time. The man did not grasp even the most simple of modern office equipment or procedure. Every single day.....EVERY SINGLE loving DAY, a minimum of 5 times, he would wander to my desk and ask me how to send an email. Always while looking randomly off into the distance. What was he emailing? Useless 'marketing' emails to the Sector Councils (and the Gods smite you where you stand if you DARE to contact the Sector Councils on your own!). Seriously lovely 'marketing' material that he made up on the fly. In NotePad. Man didn't know what MS Word was. Many was the time I told him to open Word, only to get a blank, deer in the headlights look from the bastard.  Ok, you need to open Word. What's Word? I don't know what that is. See that big blue W on your desktop? *looks at actual desk surface* (this is not an exaggeration) No.....*taps monitor* THIS desktop. THIS big blue W. This is Word.You had to email him files, since he had no clue how to access the files on the server (It's in the X Drive. I don't know what the X drive is.) And he had no idea how to save the files to the server. And I always had to show him how to open the drat file he insisted on being emailed to him. And how to print it. So that he could print himself up 6 loving copies to be filed in 6 different drawers in his office. He did the same with emails, then deleted them, then freaked out because he could not find the email he deleted. Part of my job was basic IT, and as such I had to know every single password in the company. He somehow managed to figure out how to change his password once. Because he didn't want me snooping through his computer and email (apparently this was why he was deleting emails). See, my immediate boss asked me once to go into Pathetic Partner's computer to access a file that was on there that never got saved to the X drive. So I did. Pathetic Partner freaked out, at one point accused me of putting a virus on his computer (he was the one that did that, by clicking any link he fancied, having just discovered his IE) and apparently spent all day figuring out how to change the password. Which he refused to give me. Not even to give to the IT Consultant who was coming in to clean out the virus. Fine. gently caress you. Say goodbye to your network cord. Took him a month to figure out I'd physically disconnected him from the entire network. He bitched until I flat out told him either give me the password so that IT guy and I can remove the virus you put on the computer in your stupidity or live without being connected to something you haven't a clue how to use in the first place so that your stupidity doesn't infect the entire system. This man also wanted me to dial a phone for him. Because dialing the big scary Bell Teleconferencing phone number and following verbal instructions for dummies was too much for him. I flat out told him this was not the 1950's and Admin do not dial phones for grown men. Since we went Virtual, I never have to deal with him anymore. YAY!!!!!!
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Apr 22, 2010 15:08
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KevinCow posted:I've had a corporate job for about a month now, and I have just one question for those of you who have been doing it for years: How have you not shot yourself yet? I can already feel it draining my soul away. Well, I'm not one for drugs and alcohol (although that is very common. See Sales Dept Liquid Lunch). But I have been known on more than one occasion to shop like it's going out of style during my lunch. Because pretty shoes and a few outfits to match make up for morons pestering me. Somehow. I also knit. Like a madwoman. Although I have had to fight the urge to ram a 2.5mm double point sock needle deep into someone's eye socket.
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Apr 24, 2010 02:10
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This talk of vacation time screw over reminds me of my first year at the Graphic Design & Printing company with the micromanaging President I mentioned earlier in the thread. See, between Christmas and New Year, the company shut down. I learn this and think "YAY!!! A week and a half or so off, no questions asked!" At the time, funds were really tight for my husband and I, and I literally depended on getting my set salary paycheck every two weeks, the exact amount. I had 1 week paid vacation and a set number of sick days (don't remember the number). I used my week vacation over my birthday week, and I ended up using all my sick time that year. Come my pay between Christmas & New Year (direct deposit), I had been deducted that entire week from my pay, resulting in using our Christmas money to pay the rent. I was livid. Turned out that in order to be paid for the days the company volutarily shut itself down, I had to have that exact amount of vacation and/or sick time. No one told me that. Still doesn't make sense to me, as every job I had after that hellhole shut down over the Christmas Break AND paid us in full for that time.
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Apr 29, 2010 00:42
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DorianGravy posted:I do have a question, though: how'd you all end up in office work? Is this something you wanted to do in college and really thought that you'd enjoy, or just something that ended up happening? I've never worked in corporate, just retail (and you can recall from our retail thread how full of poo poo those places are). I somehow fell into it. Which is weird, because I actually studied Fashion Design and the only time I had ever been in an office was when I went into my dad's office at the bank to ask for money for poo poo when I was a teen. See, when I finished school, with my shining Fashion Design Diploma and full portfolio of fashion sketches, I moved to Toronto to find work in my field. I went on Welfare while I looked for work that wasn't tied to an industrial sewing machine doing piecework. I had this idea of getting experience, making contacts, etc, until I could start up my own line. Then enter Mike Harris and the "Common Sense Revolution". Part of which was "Let's cut welfare so that recipients can't afford anything better than white bread and baloney, and never mind affording food, rent and heat/hydro!". I had to get a job and fast. After falling for several questionable job ads (Be A Manager! Sell Perfume! After you spend weeks unpaid sitting in 'training' and giving us money!), I took a chance and drafted a resume and applied for a job as a receptionist in a software company, telling myself that learning about business from the inside would be good for my future plans in creating the next House Of Chanel. Sigh. Now I'm depressed. I coulda been somebody.
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May 2, 2010 02:46
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Silly Newbie posted:Honestly, because some people are just that stupid. There's someone, somewhere, who prints every email they receive, deletes it from the inbox, and can only reply back if they know your email address, or have it handy. There is. I worked with him for about 5 years. He is an idiot in everything he does. (please note that he would ask me to come into his office and type the email address FROM the printed email into the TO: line. Because he couldn't figure it out himself. This man is in his 60's.)
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Jun 18, 2010 15:34
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CaptainVideo posted:Oh, I know. I know. I've worked in IT for going on 20 years now and if I've learned anything, it is that there is absolutely no limit to people's stupidity. I talked at length to a guy who was tech support for ATMs and we really wondered how some people actually make it out of the house every day without killing themselves by drinking bleach or drowning in the shower or something. Then I'm not the only person who has had to do something like this for a moron in a high level position!
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Jun 18, 2010 15:36
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Dalek posted:It's actually super-useful when your boss has no idea how to use email. Mine used to do the whole 'print out the email and hand it to me' deal. After I explained that forwarding the email to me was far more useful, he would do one of three things: Seriously. It's very comforting to me to know that I am not alone in this! This thread alone has presented me with two individuals who have suffered through this poo poo. Even though I do not work at that place anymore (just now and then as a Virtual Assistant, and no contact whatsoever with the moron), I still get fustrated thinking about that idiot. However, he could not figure out how to play any of the standard games that came with Windows, so he would steal people's newspapers and read them all day long, then bitch and complain about how he was being shut out of everything.
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Jun 18, 2010 15:40
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