Happy Secretary Day

When I was a kid, there were Secretaries. There wasn't such a thing as Secretary Day, but there still were secretaries. You'd see them on TV mostly working for Doctors, Lawyers, or Private Eyes like Mannix or Columbo. They would do stuff like answer the phone, open the mail, take dictation, write letters, type, file stuff, find important documents that the boss would lose and sometimes even make coffee.

Then something happened. I think it was the early nineties. The name changed from Secretary to Administrative Assistant. They become younger, less professional, and started chewing gum. They stopped opening and sorting the mail, and didn't dictate, they would only type e-mail to their friends, they didn't know how to file – so they just shoved all the folders into drawers and they NEVER made coffee.

I've been in the office environment for about twenty five years and have actually met 2 real secretaries. They were older women who would proudly do all that I described earlier and even knew and used shorthand. They didn't consider making coffee demeaning and they considered personal calls unprofessional. They were very good at what they did. They would type a million words a minute, be able to format and margin a page, knew and used correct grammar, and could find documents that were filed ten years earlier.

Do you want to know why they could do all of these things? .....................It's simple, they went to a professional Secretary School or college.

In our Engineering department, we have about thirty guys. We don't have an Administrative Assistant and neither does out boss, but our boss's boss does. He's always out of town and doesn't know what she does, so he encourages us to give her work. One day I tried to give her some instructions to type, but she said she doesn't do that kind of work. Another time I asked for some files, but she didn't know where they were. Then once, I asked if she could bring my mail over to the Engineering department, but she said that if she did that, then all the other Engineers would want their mail and it was easier for her to just keep it in a pile for us to sort through.

Because I'm the curious type, I watched her for a day to see what an Administrative assistant did;

She came in around 10:00 am because she had to drive her kid to day care. Then she got a cup of coffee for herself and opened up her Yahoo e-mail account. After responding to her e-mails and sending out some e-cards to her friends she started to make some personal phone calls to other Administrative Assistants. Then when she got bored with that, she looked through the Avon catalog. Then the phone rang and it was one of her friends asking to go to lunch. She grabbed her really big purse (which I'm sure she needs for important documents) and headed off to lunch 30 minutes early. Around 1:20 she came back and found a post note on her desk from one of the Engineers asking for some staples. She threw out the post note and opened up a solitaire game because it was almost break time.

That was all I could take. Besides, I had to get back to my desk because I had to write an instruction sheet. All the Engineers write their own documents. We use the "Hunt and Peck" method and have no clue how to format a header or footer. It usually takes anyone of us a few hours to write a report and another hour or so to get it to look correct. The old secretary I talked about earlier could whip something like that together in 20 minutes. I'd like to wish all of the real Secretaries a Happy Secretaries Day!