I’m looking at a computer monitor. My eyes are open and from the side it seems like I’m looking at something on the screen, maybe reading. I’m not reading. I’m not looking at anything in particular. I’m not even seeing the screen. I’m doing nothing. I’m an office assistant.
In the past nine years, I have been employed as an Executive Assistant, Administrative Assistant, and Personal Assistant. I have occupied living rooms, dress closets, small cubicles, big cubicles, and executive suites. My compensation has ranged from $10 to $30 per hour, both with or without benefits.
I started assisting while in graduate school. I went to film school in Los Angeles and aspired to get a job in entertainment after graduation. When the opportunity to intern at a small film production company came along, I grabbed it. I didn’t know that the word internship was code for free office work.
I showed up on my first day of interning at a house on Sunset Boulevard, adjacent to the affluent Bel Air neighborhood. A blond woman in her late 30s greeted me at the door, invited me inside, and showed me to a small office next to the front door. This was her home office. There wasn’t any other company office. I was going to work in that space, four hours a day, three times a week. Then a baby started crying in the other room. A welcome of sorts.
The work I did for this production company mainly involved printing and mailing letters, setting up networking lunches, and dealing with computer problems. I didn’t do any creative work, as the internship promised. I wasn’t even exposed to the entertainment industry. This production company was a DBA (Doing Business As) entity with no staff, no payroll, no website, and no real film projects. I hoped that things would change in time. They didn’t.
After the three-month internship ended, I accepted an offer to continue working for this production company as a part-time assistant. My boss had helped me financially when I needed four thousand dollars to pay my last graduate school semester, and since I couldn’t repay her, we agreed for me to work until I repaid the no-interest loan.
I remained at this job, which paid $10 per hour with no benefits, for two years. I was in charge of everything in that tiny home office. I was a personal assistant, the company’s executive assistant, and my boss’ right hand. I helped her move to a new house, I processed her kids’ preschool applications, I handmade invitations to charity events she organized, and tied ribbon bows to her Christmas cards.
Back at home at night, I was tired, my eyes stinging from staring at the office computer. I didn’t feel I had accomplished anything all day. I felt empty. It looked like I was productive – pushing paper, pressing keys on a keyboard – but I was merely wasting my life. I was truly productive when I created something, be it a screenplay or a song, or made a difference to a cause or a project with my contribution. Office work didn’t create anything and made no difference to anything. I simply moved my body, or a body part, from point A to point B, eight hours a day, five days a week.
While working part-time at that production company, I took a part-time internship at the office of a writing agent in Beverly Hills. He was the Hollywood agent of novelist John Updike. In hopes of having my screenplays read by him and, hopefully, getting an agent through his connections, I agreed to work at his office as an assistant for three months. The work involved reading screenplays and book manuscripts and writing coverage. I also answered phones, wrote letters, and scheduled meetings.
One day, the agent came into my office with a one-gallon plastic jug of water. He said, “Something’s funny with this water. I want you to go to Rite Aid and return it.” I looked at the jug. It was half-empty.
“It’s half-empty,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. Tell them you work for me. We’ve done this before.”
“Are you sure about this?” I said.
“Just tell them we’ve done this before,” he repeated.
I took the jug and headed to Rite Aid. When I got to the register, I put the half-empty jug on the counter and said, “I would like to return this water.” The cashier woman looked at the jug.
“It’s half-empty,” she said.
“I know,” I said, “but we’ve done this before.”
“Who are ‘we’?”
“I work for KS, and he said that he’s done this before.”
“Who’s KS?” she said.
“He’s an agent,” I said.
“But the jug is half-empty.”
“I know,” I said.
It’s hard to describe the embarrassment I felt at that moment. My ears were red and burning, and my face was contorted in a fake, please-kill-me-now smile. Finally, the woman called her supervisor, who, for some crazy reason, allowed me to exchange the water. On my way back to the office with the new jug, I vowed to never work as an assistant again. When I got home that night, my fridge was empty, as well as my stomach and bank account. I broke my vow.
My third assisting gig was really special. This time, I was stationed in a small dress closet, next to a bathroom. It was another production company, helmed by a semi-famous actress, who was in the middle of a bitter divorce. I was, again, the only staff member of the company. I faxed thousands of pages to law firms, helped with art auctions of fought-over Andy Warhol lithographs, paid house utility bills, wrote and mailed letters, made birthday and Christmas invitations, and assisted my boss’ old mother, who was dying from cancer in the next room.
I felt no better after work, in spite of the pay increase to $20 per hour, which I got after a year at that job. Did I make any difference to anything? No. Did anything really get done? No. I was crammed in that closet along with a small desk, a chair, a filing cabinet, a fax machine, a printer, reams of office paper, and a Grammy Award. I had no health insurance, no car, no money, and forty-five thousand dollars of student loan debt. By all accounts, assisting was a paltry way to earn a living. It was a demeaning, life-denying, wasteful way to spend one’s life.
One day, my boss’ mother died. Then one of her two cats slipped and fell from the fifteenth floor and died. It was time for me to leave the dress closet. At 33, I discovered the world of temping.
Being a temp plainly sucks. It reeks of desperation, dead ambitions, and long commutes on buses with numbers in the upper hundreds. I started my journey in templand with stuffing envelopes for a day. My tongue was raw from licking hundreds of envelope flaps and bloody from numerous paper cuts. Then I was a receptionist at a downtown law firm, where I manned a switchboard with no clue how to operate it. I was even considered for a job at the batting cages of a sporting complex.
What I realized from these disparate jobs was that companies were willing to pay $12 per hour to anybody who looked somewhat presentable and was able to string together a few pleasantries. Education and erudition didn’t matter. Getting the job done is the priority in templand. Human potential, preferences, and job satisfaction are completely and utterly invalidated.
After four months of struggling to pay my rent from infrequent temp jobs and experiencing stress-induced psychosomatic pain in different parts of my body, I landed a full-time job at a big nonprofit company as an administrative assistant. I was given a nice, gray cubicle, with a splendid view of the beach. For the first time in my professional life, I had health insurance, vacation days, and a 401(k) retirement plan. Work was tedious, I was overqualified for the job, but the people I worked with were great. They were a mix of doctors, both M.D.s and Ph.D.s, who were very busy with writing grant proposals and doing research. I wasn’t micromanaged and, being a fast worker, I enjoyed long periods of inactivity.
What’s a creative person to do when presented with downtime on a job? Create! Over the next five years, I wrote a score of articles, a non-fiction book, and a couple of screenplays. I read books, did stock market research, and started to invest. I would take my daughter to school in the morning, get to work, do a few things, go have lunch at home, then walk back to work to do a few more tasks. I had flexibility, job security, fun, and always got stellar annual performance reviews.
It was surreal that I had so much freedom as an assistant. It went against the tenets of the profession: hard work, first in, last out, no breaks, lunch at the desk. I didn’t like the job, but the sense of liberty was intoxicating. Strangest of all, it was happening not at a liberal, incentive-rich company, but at a conservative, long-standing organization. Sooner or later, something had to give. When it did, it was quick, painful, and brutal. I was escorted by security to the lobby, my badge was taken away, and I was left with a cartload of my stuff on the street. I felt betrayed, shell-shocked, stunned. I was unemployed.
I learned many lessons from these assisting jobs, but the main twelve are:
1. Never work as an assistant. You are not achieving your goals, but somebody else’s.
2. You have more human potential than any job would ever require of you.
3. When you feel that you’ve had it with a job, find a way out before it gets ugly.
4. Never cross the limits of company’s work policy.
5. Never wink and give thumbs up at the same time to coworkers. They will report you. Same for patting them on the shoulder.
6. Always be on time.
7. Never have a two-hour lunch break.
8. Never presume that most people you work with are your friends. They are not.
9. Never assume that the company you work for cares about you. It doesn’t. Everybody is replaceable.
10. High-level performance doesn’t keep the job of an hourly worker. Following the rules does.
11. Never try to stage a revolution at work. Bureaucracy or inept management will kill it.
12. Never agree to work in a dress closet.
Now, if I ever get in a position to have an assistant in the future, here are the rules I will follow as a boss:
1. Always treat the assistant with utmost respect.
2. Never be condescending, mean, or rude with the assistant.
3. Pay the assistant more than he/she expects to be paid.
4. Know that assisting, like waiting tables, is a temporary job for the assistant.
5. Be genuinely interested in the assistant’s life.
6. Serve and help the assistant as much as, if not more than, he/she serves and helps you.
7. Don’t micromanage the assistant.
8. As long as the assistant has done the daily work (even if it took less than 8 hours), allow the assistant to do whatever he/she wants.
9. Encourage the assistant to fulfill his/her human potential, even at the expense of losing the assistant.
10. Be patient with the assistant.
11. Don’t abuse the assistant, neither verbally, nor physically.
12. Trust the assistant.
Today, I’m back to temping. Looking at a computer screen without seeing it for eight hours is too much fun to live without. I just checked my bank account and saw that I had been paid for last week’s work. Money for nothing. I’m ashamed to take it, but I will. I’m an assistant, and I’m happy you’re not.