The Calendar Gods are in Alignment

There are times when calendaring can be a joy or the very circle of hell.  I'm pretty sure when Dante wrote of the 'ninth circle of hell' he was managing a number calenders simultaneously.

But every so often miracles appear and the universe aligns.  Calendars line up and a coveted time opens up.  I swear I can hear angelic choruses singing grand hallelujahs. 

My day is wonderful. I feel like a miracle worker.  What does the boss say?  'So?'

Ingrate.

You Be the Judge

Dear Reader,

Not too long ago, Admin Gal was made aware of an unfortunate situation of an administrative colleague.  

We Admins are often in positions to make many different decisions based on undocumented conversations.  This particular colleague had been asked to add some variety to the catering to an annual multi-week event.  Ever conscious of budgets and time constraints, this Admin went to work to make this request happen.

Imagine her surprise when she was taken to task by her manager, in front of multiple departments, for having blown a budget.  

Here are some key points to take into consideration:

1.     Said Admin had negotiated excellent rates with every vendor who provided food for the event.

2.     At no point did the manager ask to see costs for the meals being provided before he made a scene.

3.     Said manager had a plate full of food as he made a fool of himself.

4.     Everything came well with in the budget alloted for the event.

Admin Gal has heard many a sad tale in her career, but this particular tale of abuse raised her hackles.  

As Admins, we are like ducks, shaking off the bad and reveling in the good.  However, one bad manager can certainly spoil the job.

Dear Reader, what would you do in our dear Admin's place?

Calendar Mayhem

When you work for a large or small corporation, the calendar is an important tool to your day to day duties. It doesn't matter if you are an admin, a manager, or a CEO.

The one thing that will aggravate EVERYONE around you is when a calendar, which is the property of the company, is blocked from the rest of the company.  We're not talking about seeing the details.  Frankly, no one cares!

I'm talking about seeing the basic Free/Busy. Thereby allowing some basic planning for when, as a courtesy, you call the person to confirm the time is actually available.

When the CEO and the Chairman of the company allow their calendars to show Free/Busy, it is poor form on an individual's part to think themselves more important than the people who allow them to have a job.

Free/Busy won't kill you, but not seeing your calendar might make important people wonder what you are hiding.

A Word to the Wise

When asking for a favor to an Admin who does not support you, you the recipient of said favor should do everything in your power to make things easier for her.

If you do not,  said Admin might do one or all of the following:

1. Conveniently move your task to the least priority pile.  The pile that gets done when hell freezes over.
2. Mail your Visa application directly to the Kremlin, even though it was for Brazil.
3. Schedule hardware maintenance on computer without providing a replacement.  
4. Cancel your smartphone contract and charge the cancellation fee to your personal credit card.
5. Revoke your access to all essential drives that contain anything that might be remotely useful in the day to day operations of your job.

As an Admin, we are required to be helpful, not be taken advantage of.  

Copier/Printer Courtesy

If a print job looks to have multiple pages, common sense AND common courtesy says to leave it be until the job is done.  Ensuring the job will have no pages missing OR out of place for the person who must pick it up.

Unfortunately, common sense and courtesy seem to be lacking in the work place.  Bits and pieces of print jobs floating on counters like flotsam cast on the ocean.  To the person picking up the bitter pieces of this mess, this is a slap in the face.  An irksome job that demands retribution.

As an Admin, I do have some recourse.  I have an in with IT.  I'm going to get a code put on the color printer.  Limiting it only to mine and my boss's use.  We'll see how long it takes for the obliviots of the company to understand the one simple and finite rule...

YOU DON'T SCREW WITH SOMEONE ELSE'S PRINT JOB!

Don't You Know Who I Am?

Admin Gal must give a shout out to a friend in the west.  She is faced with many of the same dilemma's, and handles them with much grace.  In particular, her latest post is a delight with Things You Say That Will Make Me Doubt You.


Her last point in particular struck a nerve, “You don’t understand, you are going to do what I tell you.  Don’t you know who I am?”  


Unfortunately, I could relate to that poorly worded demand.  My response is pretty standard, "Actually, no, I don’t know who you are. I know all the important people by name and sight."  All the while smiling sweetly or having a sweet tone in my voice if the person is on the phone uttering such an unfortunate statement.


My internal meter for lying is pretty accurate.  When someone is pushing the 'Don't you know who I am?' card, it generally means they have absolutely nothing to back themselves up with and are blow hards. 


Now, if said individuals had asked politely for assistance.  Explaining the situation and the urgency to them, allowing for some give and take, nine times out of ten they would find that the aid/information/meetings they were trying to bully themselves into would be given freely or opportunities for other options would be opened up to them.


Instead - they are dead in the water.  Shark bait.

It must be hard for people to be important in the small land of their imagination.

The Paper Fairy Doesn't Live Here

oes the Admin Gal have wings?  Do you really want her visiting you when she finds 20 unprinted jobs stacked up on the printer and the only excuse was 'there was no paper?'

I hate to break it to you folks ... but there is no Paper Fairy!  There I said it!  There is no magical being who goes from printer to copier waving their magical wand, filling the paper trays as they skip merrily along.

NO - what you have is a very cranky, annoyed and pretty pissy Admin. Who can not fathom why her co-workers fingers are broken.  Or why their brain-pans are so small that they can not perform a function that a chimpanzee could master in minutes. (Oh, and the monkey would be bored)

It doesn't take any more time to put in a ream of paper than it does to to go back to your desk and print to another machine.

Do yourself and everyone else a favor - FILL THE PAPER TRAY.  It won't kill you, but the non-existent Paper Fairy might.

A Word to the Wise

Dear Sales Person, Employee, and/or Person in General,

Administrative Assistants around the world are not creatures who sit around doing nothing.  We are productive members of any business environment.  We contribute to ongoing projects, we maintain office order, calendar cohesion, document management, personnel moral, in addition to a myriad of other tasks and projects that are assigned to our functions.

Copying our supervisors on an email about a task that is not priority will not miraculously cause it to surface to the top of the list.  Flagging any correspondence with ‘HIGH PRIORITY’ only indicates your own sense of inflated ego.

To the sales people in specific, if an admin tells you their boss will not be meeting with you now or in the future – that is the truth.  Sending the boss an email with available dates and times and copying the admin is the epitome of classlessness.  Be prepared to be shut down.

We work with our bosses to prioritize our projects and tasks to benefit them, not for someone who is not in our organizational structure.  While the persistence and ingenuity can be admired, the audacity can only be considered appalling.

A word to the wise, flagging, prioritizing, or copying our supervisors/bosses with your projects and tasks only makes us annoyed.

Sincerely,

The Admins

Give A Gal A Bone

Admin Gal feels like a dog with a bone and ten toys, guarding her stash.

I walk a fine line with my resources so that the business needs may be met by the employees in her care while working with the consultants that are in the midst of the company transition.

Frankly I’m exhausted!

Help me do the math.  200 employees, 5 functioning conference rooms, 20-30 meetings on any given day.  Add to this volatile mix, consultants who are doing data transfers who require quiet places to hold hour plus long conference calls at indeterminate times.  The math doesn’t work!

There are no guarantees that I can get the consultants a conference room, so they are in cubes conducting these calls on speakerphone.  Things are tense already.

I’d say give the Admin Gal a bone, but right now I’m guarding my stash and won’t come out of my hole.

So, giving me another bone to guard might not be a great idea when I'm ready to snap.

Melting the Myth

Admin Gal is irritated. Why do you ask, oh fabulous reader? I’ll tell you!

Admin Gal is irritated with the double standard of perfection. Yes, that nasty, unobtainable expectation that is set forth before us in our performance evaluations. Yet frankly, never achievable.

Perfection on the job is a high subjective thing. One person’s perception of perfection will be completely counter another person.

The dilemma Admin Gal faces is she can’t read minds. This automatically sets her up for failure in the eyes of the person expecting perfection.

Maybe Admin Gal is becoming Zen or numb. But she has come to the realization that perfection is as elusive as the frost on a window. Pretty to look at, but under scrutiny it melts into nothing.

So, Admin Gal ignores the unobtainable expectations of others dreams of perfections. She simply lives a life that is guided by integrity, diligence and the desire to always do ones best.

At the end of the day, those same people can seldom live up to their own expectations of perfection.

Why should Admin Gal?

On the Cheap

Nothing seems to be safe anymore in today’s employment climate. Gone is security of generations gone by. Very few people can stick with one company for their entire career. If they manage to do that, they have to reinvent themselves to stay ahead of the latest management model that leans toward automation, downsizing or out-sourcing.

I realize that there are many processes that can be outsourced, off-shored, and just plain automated. When all these cost cutting measures are taking place, what happens to the actual employee, who helped build the company? The general morale? The principles that built the company? More importantly the corporate history?

While the government gives lip-service to keeping jobs in the country, more and more companies are sending department functions overseas. Why? ‘Because it can be done cheaper elsewhere’. Sure, there are binding contracts that impose penalties if things are not done to the SLA's (service level agreements) of the corporation, but what happens to the customer service interface? There are no guarantees that expectations will be met.

To be frank the customer wants to interface with employees they feel confident will fulfill their needs. Not third-party vendors that have no clue as to why the company even exists.

As employees ride these waves of uncertainty in the workplace, they go through cycles of anger and fear. Rightfully so. Whether they have been with the company 3 months or 30 years, their livelihood is threatened. So the affected portions of the company are shunted off to the side, cut off from the rest of their corporate brethren. The isolation takes its toll on morale and perception.
While the management who has to manage the outsourcing process must be sensitive to the needs of the employees, the rest of the company is oblivious and often makes matters worse.

I don’t have a crystal ball that tells the future, but I do know that when a company treats their employee as well as it treats its customers there is a renaissance in business and vitality.

When a corporation treats its employees as so much dross, they will soon follow their greatest assets, the employee, into oblivion.

How RUDE!

Earning an income is a simple equation:
Work x Application = Income
This isn't rocket science (unless of course you are a rocket scientist, then it's a whole other ball of wax).
Admin Gal has an ax to grind with Sales People.
Admin Gal gets the fact that sales people need to make a living.  If they are respectful of her, she will do what she can to get them to the right people to open a dialog.  No, sales people do NOT need to speak to the top of the totem pole at the first swing.  Let me get you to the correct person.
DO NOT call incessantly hoping, beyond hope, to catch Admin Gal's boss on the phone when she is 'off duty'.  It isn't going to happen.

A - Admin Gal's boss won't pick up a number he doesn't recognize.

B - Breathing heavy then hanging up is just plain RUDE.

C - Just do what Admin Gal has asked you to do.

Admin Gal is NOT Pleased!

Today started out high octane, just the way Admin Gal likes it.  Lots to do, people to coordinate, mountains to climbs and oceans to swim.  All this before noon. 

The lunch hour arrives. Admin Gal goes into the floor kitchenette to retrieve her lunch.  (After all, in these trying times being frugal is the new sign of prosperity.) To her dismay, her lunch is gone!  The space where her lunch inhabited is empty. Zip, nada, zilch. 

Now, her lunchtime offerings were not any gastronomic delicacy.  Lunch was simply a frozen dinner.  The point is that Admin Gal purchased said dinner with her hard earned money.  Having purchased it, expected it to be where she put it!

So now a note, vetted by the HR representative on the floor adorns the refrigerator:

“If you did NOT BRING the FOOD in the REFRIGERATOR,

DO NOT EAT THE FOOD!

THEFT IS NOT LOOKED KINDLY UPON”

Admin Gal was asked to remove all references to quartering, maiming and humiliation. She thought it would make the point more valid.  Some people have no sense of drama.

Dress Code or How Not to Dress Like a Pop Tart

The summer has drawn to a close.  People have once more started covering their bodies with more layers of clothing in order to accommodate the wildly fluctuating temperatures of the fall.  HOWEVER...
That doesn't mean that some people do not try to keep summer alive.  The sad, sad truth is that companies need to put forth some sort of dress codes. If only to educate the clueless.
This summer my eyes have been assaulted with cleavage baring tops on people where more fabric is a necessity not a fashion statement.  Skirts that with a stiff wind or an inappropriate bend the world would be privy to their privates.  More knarly, sparkly flip-flops that were stinky bio-hazards that did not belong in a corporate environment.  All of the above a direct violation of the company's dress code.

People.  I am not the fashion police.  I'm sure that people look at me and say I could desperately use a make over.  But when I leave the house in the morning, I know that no fashion catastophe will happen.  All my bits and parts will stay properly covered and never see the light of day so that my co-workers will wish never had happened.

The advice of a good friend follows :   Folks – put a mirror in your foyer – one last look before you leave for work, doesn’t hurt.  If you have to question to yourself whether or not something is appropriate, it probably isn’t!

Mid-Year Evaluation Time

Time for the Mid-Year Evaluation.   I dread this time of year.  My stomach clenches, migraines lurk on the edge of my consciousness, every little stupid annoyance becomes a drama of epic proportion. Why?  Because I’m being judge by people who really have no clue about what I do.
Gone are the halcyon days when the average secretary was thought to just answered phones, typed memos and got cups of coffee (yes, I know this is a glittering generality).   The reality is the Administrative Professional is a project manager, an office manager, often times a human resource manager, an accountant, and a candlestick maker.

We do all this while making our boss look good.  The surface of our pond, lake, inland sea is smooth as glass, while the rip currents underneath are treacherous.  The people around us have no clue about what it takes to make things go smoothly.

So, I sit here filling out my portion of my Mid-Year evaluation, celebrating the triumphs and delicately explaining my defeats.  Because when push comes to shove, the triumphs aren’t what get in your personnel jacket.

Consultant vs. Vendor

There are many types of relationships in the business world.  Some more permanent than others.  Over the years, I have found the relationships that I develop with my preferred vendors have seen me through thick and thin.

Unfortunately, those relationships can be threatened by the introduction of a new player in town.  The Consultant.

Consultants are people that are paid by the company to tell us how to do things.  Yes, that’s right, we pay them to tell us what to do.  That means the consultant generally comes already equipped with a healthy ego and a sense of entitlement.

They invade the work place like ants at a picnic.  Sticking their noses everywhere, playing merry-hob with calendars and demanding resources like they were executives.

Here is a warning to my fly-by-night consultants. MESS NOT WITH MY VENDOR RELATIONSHIP, LEST YE FEEL THE WRATH OF THE ASSISTANT!


You, the consultant, are here for only a short time.  Your demands are petty and short-lived.  I have to live with the mess you leave behind.

I know where your monies are sent.  I know the admins at your headquarters. I am not afraid to make your collective lives miserable!

RESPECT THE MEETING NOTICE!

MEETING - an assembly or conference of persons for a specific purpose or event.

There is nothing more frustrating than having set up a meeting 45 days ago, then finding out the day of the meeting that two of the principle players couldn’t be bothered to participate.  They accepted, but never chose to change their status so that alternative arrangements could be made.

This particular meeting had already been rescheduled 4 times.  All participants tell me it is imperative to have said meeting.  My boss, who was at the right time at the right place, was made to look bad.  Which in turn made me feel crappy.

I get it, plans change.  People get busy.

For Pete Sakes! Check your calendar and be courteous.  Decline the meeting if you aren’t coming.

Hanging by a Thread

I'm hanging by a thread of sanity.  My status of miracle worker is being severely tested.

Miracles, people!  I perform Miracles!  I don't create the impossible.  I don't make things appear out of nothing.  I don't create matter out of nothing.

Contrary to Popular Opinion ...

Contrary to popular opinion I am not a miracle worker, a maid or a butler, a childcare provider, a janitor, a dictionary or encyclopedia, an ATM, or whatever else the pointy-hair boss can think of.  I often produce what is perceived as miracles, however it is simply know how to do my job well.
I can not properly set-up meetings, this includes conference rooms, call-in numbers, and invite attendees, without ALL the information.  Just FYI, ESP does not come naturally in the role of Administrative Assistant.

Unless it is specifically spelled out in my job description/ contract, I am not required to pick up your dry-cleaning, walk your dogs, or oversee the contractors building your mega-mansion.  This falls in the realm of a personal assistant, and that is a whole different kettle of fish.

Your children are adorable. But if they have to come into the office after school and I have deadlines, please keep them in your office.  My desk is not for childcare or their entertainment.
I hope that this small tutorial can prove to be instructional in the use of an Administrative Assistant.

Sales Professionals

Everyday, I am inundated with sales pitches for various widgets, dowickies, and thingamabobs that are guaranteed to save the company, better the work environment, cure the common cold, and even make gold out of paperclips.  Yes, the world is their oyster, if I'd only put them in contact with the right person in my organization.

No, I will not put you in contact with my boss. That's why they pay me the big bucks!
Please don't think that I'm deaf if you are in a call center and you represent yourself as a director of sales of anything.  I'm not stupid.

A note to the sales professional.  Do your research.  Go to the web site, look around. I'm not going to do your job for you.

I get the best and the worst on my end of the telephone.  For every ten annoying calls, I get a gem that makes me grateful for those moments.

But as to the rest?  Fie on them!  I liken them to an infestation of rodents that are invading my workspace. Over, under, and around they attack I must be ever vigilant.