Posted on 04/28/2011 8:17:26 AM PDT by Borges
THE 1950s and ’60s brought many new things to American offices, including the Xerox machine, word processing and — perhaps less famously — the first National Secretaries Day, in 1952. Secretaries of that era envisioned a rosy future, and many saw their jobs as a ticket to a better life.
In 1961, the trade magazine Today’s Secretary predicted that, 50 years hence, the “secretary of the future” would start her workday at noon and take monthlong vacations thanks to the “electronic computer.” According to another optimistic assessment, secretaries (transported through office hallways “via trackless plastic bubble”) would be in ever-higher demand because of what was vaguely referred to as “business expansion.”
But nearly 60 years later, on the date now promoted as Administrative Professionals Day, we’re living through the end of a recession in which around two million administrative and clerical workers lost their jobs after bosses discovered they could handle their calendars and travel arrangements online and rendered their assistants expendable. Clearly, while the secretary hasn’t joined the office boy and the iceman in the elephant’s graveyard of outmoded occupations, technological advancements haven’t panned out quite the way those midcentury futurists imagined. There are satisfactions to the job, to be sure, but for many secretaries, it remains often taxing, sometimes humiliating and increasingly precarious.
New technologies did make the lives of 20th-century secretaries easier. By the 1920s the typewriter had cemented women’s place in the outer office, and later versions made for faster, less strenuous typing (“Alive After Five!” was the way a 1957 ad put it). The introduction of the Xerox 914 photocopier in 1959 did away with the laborious routine of carbon copies.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
As long as there are male bosses, and male customers there will be pretty secretaries.
I have a friend who is an engineer who would love to have a secretary. He is asked to do all kinds of things that would be easy to pass on to a secretary, leaving him free to do more engineering type activities.
Instead, these engineers bill out at $150-$200 per hour to do things that a secretary could do for a fraction of the cost. I think companies are shooting themselves in the foot by eliminating secretaries.
Booming economy in 2007. Back then, you could have a little attitude and, in you got fired, you could get another job in short order. Today, most people tread a little lightly, even though "the recovery is on track".
Suz, you are right on.
We save our customer a boat-load of money by pricing admin tasks at admin rates, instead of software engineer rates!
I agree. The distraction of what used to be secretarial work cuts into the productivity of engineers and other "knowledge professionals," and they're usually not any good at typing, filing, and keeping a calendar, either. My husband can't find his own shoes or remember our kids' middle names, much less manage his calendar. But oh well ...
Yup. A good secretary is worth much more than what she is paid. Especially if she can do more complex tasks the longer she is there.
A lot of other guys in business I know still have them. There is always paperwork needs that needs done and in most cases, a real person needs to pick up the phone when customers call.
I have one that works for me that’s been here almost as long as me. Started out people in the group needed word processing, typing, etc. But now, with virtually everything done online now in the organization (timesheets, travel, ordering, etc.) there isn’t much use for a secretary. About all she really does now is make travel arrangements and answer the phone for most of the job. The rest of the time she drives me up the wall with all these questions about this or that because she doesn’t have enough to do.
Now run along honey, and get me a cup of coffee.
I'm female and for thirteen years I had the GREATEST male secretary in the world! I was bummed-out when he retired.
My mom’s an office manager for an electrical engineer. When she’s gone on vacation or when she had surgery earlier this year, he was lost! :) They have worked it out so that she can work from home a couple of days a week (she lives 45 minutes from the city).
She started her secretarial career back in the late 70s working for her current boss’s father in an insurance agency in downtown Indianapolis. She’s only been out of work once in all that time (after 9/11, she worked for a company that was related to the trucking industry and was let go when business plummeted).
Actually, I said that tongue in cheek.
I had the best “assistant” when I took my first executive job. She was about ten years older than me. She took me aside and told me how it was going to work.
She took over my calendar.
She took over my appointments and phone calls.
She took over my paperwork.
She organized me in a way that I had never been before.
She explained to me that she was my best friend. She needed to know what I was doing, where I was going, and who everyone was. She told me that I had to trust her with stuff that no one else would know. If I had the inclination to be places I shouldn’t be, I had to trust her to “block” for me. (I never took her up on that one.)
In the end, she made me 200% better than I was ever going to be on my own.
For years we worked together. There was never any hanky panky. There was never any suspicion of hanky panky. She got to know my wife, and my wife loved her.
Leaving her behind when I left that job was the only thing I missed.
Old school Executive Secretaries are worth their weight in gold.
Secretaries have always been underrated. Nowadays a person thinks just because he/she can plunk away at a keyboard that THAT makes them a secretary. Not so. In the old days, especially for legal secretaries, you had to be very intelligent AND a fast typist.
Yep!
Sad but true. Unfortunately, good 'office skills' seem to be lost on people. It amazes me how so many 'educated' people I interact with every day can barely communicate professionally. Many of the younger people fresh out of school lack so much common sense, I'd almost call them neanderthals. Every now and then you'll find a good one.
Secretaries are still great for organization things, transcribing dictation, cover letters, etc. But the workload per attorney is just a lot less now.
My wife works for a multi-campus community college, the secretaries run the place. Administrators are constantly shuffling between campuses and between titles on campus, they usually leave the secretaries where they are. So if you go to see Administrator X there’s a really good chance there’s a really good chance they’ve been in that title on that campus for less than a year, the secretary has probably been there a decade though, guess which one really makes the decision on how your situation will be resolved.
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