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Secret Diary of a Secretary

 

I'm leaving secretarial work. I ought never to have started. 
 
A large part of being a secretary is offering false, tolerant smiles to entitled people who are shouting at you. I imagine the entitled people are far, far worse when the secretary is female.

There is the cliche: The things you love about a new situation are the same things that you will come to hate. I became a secretary because the mundane, predictable tasks appealed to me. Now the predictability drives me up the wall.

I think the number-one thing I hate about secretarial work is The Diplomatic E-mail Task. Your privileged client has not done the thing you've requested. You know this--clear as day--but you can't begin your follow-up email by saying, "You didn't do that simple thing you needed to do." You must feign tact, even feign a small amount of mystification: "My record indicates you have not set up your account. The record may be in error. If so, could you please..... But if the record is *not* in error, could you please...."

The fiction of the possibly erroneous record. This is something all secretaries must lean on.

I am leaving the desk to become a tutor. I had once thought that secretarial work would be a helpful placeholder; being at the desk would allow my brain some rest, so that I could launch some kind of writing career. I'm still baffled by that hazy dream. But I continue to like writing, and I know that I have a weird ability to get other people interested in writing. And I know that this ability is unusual.

It's with some terror that I wander back into the tutoring world--self-confidence has never been a major part of my psyche--but I know I'll figure things out. And I'm maybe pleased to feel that terror. It has been missing for a while. It's not--or not entirely--a bad thing. Stay tuned.
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