Summer Madness

A good Admin tracks calendars, meetings and the occasional UFO through out the course of her duties.  During the summer months the added stress of tracking the dates of the executives vacation schedules can be enough to send one around the bend.

The purpose of a good calendar system is to use it to block out vacation days.  Not to let everyone guess where you might be when you disappear.  On top of that people feel it necessary to guard the contents of their calendars like they are national secrets, privy only to the President himself.  REALLY?

Look, I don’t care if you are having lunch with the Dali Lama or your girlfriend.  If the boss is asking where you are and I can see if you are on vacation or in a meeting there are problems.

Do me a favor, as your Admin and let me when you are out of the office.

A Day Away

When an Admin is away, be it for vacation, training, or whatever, strange thing happen to their desks.  Mountains of paper gravitate mysteriously to any flat surface forming precarious piles. Anything of questionable nature lands haphazardly on the desk chair, the desk or the floor around the desk.  Plants mysteriously sicken and are never the same again, this Admin thinks they’ve been traumatized by what strange things they’ve witnessed.  Needless to say, time off is a terrifying proposition.

While the time off is often needed and wanted, a small part of our brain way back in the back is ticking down the time to our return.  Doing our best to ignore it, we turn off our cell phones, promising our selves we will ignore all calls from the office. We approach all computers like they are live ordinance, fighting the urge to log on to our email client just to get a jump- start.

Sometimes the urge is to strong and we give in, only to be horrified by the sheer volume of people ignoring the Out Of Office (OOO) message.  The assumption that we will take care of them during our time off because they are special.

If the Admin is smart, they book  a cruise were cell phone reception or internet connectivity is non-existent and have a long cold drink.