“When you’ve got a second, Love”

Tales of Horror From The Filing Drawer

Admin staff are among the cleverest and most capable I’ve ever come across. They are professional, they know everything that goes on in their offices along, they type the most amazingly long documents at a moment’s notice, and in a rush, along the way correcting the spelling, grammar and poor expression used by their ‘superiors’. A good administrator will make the office run on time, look professional, document everything and still be fantastically pleasant to even the rudest clients and staff.

But theses totally groovy people are at the bottom of the heap. Heaps of admin staff don’t have a lunch break, and many of those that do are expected to answer the phones and type letters during their ‘break’. Getting back even a few minutes late from a break is career suicide – suddenly no-one cares who answers the phone while the boss serves out a severe grilling.

While front of house reception staff dress impeccably on tiny salaries, the people making thrice their salary throw on last week’s trakky daks and an offensive t-shirt and saunter in late after a night on the turps…`No calls please! I’m hung over’.

And they’re always the first to go. Any company in trouble will fire the admin people first and use the money to put on another CEO. Of course the office falls apart while 6 people who have degrees and earn $150k stand around the fax machine wondering why using one was never taught at uni.

But increasingly, admin people have degrees but maybe didn’t get all HD’s, or just went really well in a degree that isn’t valued so highly by employers. It can be tough seeing someone with similar qualifications to yourself rocketing into career stratosphere while you get stuck answering their calls.

Admin people are can-do people. They tackle tasks head-on and if there isn’t a way of doing it, they create a way. They shuffle getting a round of coffees while making 6 copies of this, 9 copies of that, answering the phone and making small talk with those really important Japanese clients that nobody is ready for just yet. But they suffer from the ‘ditsy secretary’ stereotype where everybody assumes that they can’t understand complex problems, don’t have enough of a brain to be interested in current affairs, and that they are what they wear. Of course when correspondence goes missing, it’s the secretary’s fault (not the CEO who didn’t draft it). Admin people organise their office, devise systems, track individual pieces of paper through complex systems and do a million things at once.

Often the secretary will be the only administrator in the office. Often she will be the only woman in the workplace. But such isolation isn’t meant to phase her, she simply has to get things done and do what she’s told. She jokes with the boys and isn’t supposed to mind their sexist comments or that she’s excluded from certain conversations – they’re just being blokes. When she tries to interest people in the office in filling in forms correctly, documenting what they do (to make reporting easier), they glaze over. But when it comes time to file reports, tabulate expenses, she sifts through a mountain of sweaty receipts and makes sure the account is square.

But there’s a perception that admin people have nothing to do – or need to be constantly told what to do and when to do it. Everyone treats the secretary as their personal workhorse. “When you’ve got a minute love can you call the courier and see where my package went? Can you make me a coffee? Can you clean your desk? Can you go and get more milk? Can you finish this report for me? Can you put my spreadsheets in order?” Ad nauseum! “When you’ve got a minute…” becomes this incessant bell tolling the secretary’s day away.

Secretaries unite!
The Boss can’t type!
If he tried to write a letter,
He’d be there all night!

(from 19 May 2005)