It's the most wonderful time of the year

Happy Administrative Assistants’ Day, everybody! It’s really funny that you’re all teasing me by sending the couriers at the very last minute to deliver my gifts; the best jokes are always the ones where you trick someone into thinking you don’t care! Ha! Ha!

What started off as Secretaries’ Day in 1952 has now blossomed into a charming, overly PC occasion to buy cards for the fresh gal who sorts your mail. The International Association of Administrative Professionals started the holiday in order to trick more people into being secretaries. It was an immediate hit! People couldn’t resist the lure of potentially getting flowers on the last Wednesday in April, and started quitting their high-paying government jobs and dropping out of med school to apply for receptionist positions.

Today, Administrative Professionals Day (registered trademark) is still a great opportunity to show your lowest level employee that they’ve made it through another year without being displaced by automated voice messaging services. As an administrative assistant, I sure would appreciate a pat on the back or some awkward small talk over lunch with my boss. I work hard! Just take a look at my exhaustive to-do list:

Working for the weekend.

Gifts-dot-com, a website dedicated to both gifts and presents, has several suggestions for this wondrous holiday; these are gifts that say “I appreciate you!” while also mentioning, kind of under their breath, hoping you won’t hear, maybe while pretending to cough, “The only thing I know about you is that you work in an office and are probably a woman.” Simply shower your employee with goodies like a Professional Teddy Bear (monogramming available!), an elegant foil balloon boquet, or a $170 basket of fruit, and you’re good for another whole year of psychological abuse/bottom-pinching. Everybody wins with Administrative Professionals’ Day™®©!

Obviously it’s too late to be shopping for this year’s gift (and almost too late to deliver them, but I know how you like living on the edge!), so here’s a handy e-card (the “e” stands for “electronic”) to send to your loyal staffer. Making this wasn’t part of my job description: it’s just another example of how administrative professionals go above and beyond to look busy to legitimize having such a fancy title. You’re welcome.

Merry Secretaries' Day to all, and to all a good night!

Spending money on things: A reflection

I am by no stretch of the imagination what one would call a “classy broad”. A combination of genealogical Protestant work ethic and nurtured middle-class modesty has resulted in an impressive frugality; one that has expressed itself via a wardrobe heavily influenced by Target and internet bargain bins.

But! My closet has had a chance to redeem itself in the eyes of sophisticates, to welcome among its pilling animal-themed tees a Shirt a Grown-Up Lady would wear. In exchange for some advertorial writing, I was recently rewarded with a DKNY gift card. In some countries, instead of paying someone for the extra work they do, people like to barter: a goat for some house painting, a goat for some apple picking, a goat for some numbered pieces of paper that historically have represented gold, etc. At my office, this distaste for so-called “currency” is apparently in effect. I’m just glad it was a gift card and not someone’s first-born son or whatever.

Even with $200 free dollars, it is hard to spend that much money on one thing when you’ve been gasping at price tags like that your whole life. “$315 for a dress?” I kept saying to myself, in my mother’s voice. “What are these? Harem pants made of, silk? Oh. Yes.”

Compared to some of the other stores on South Granville, where I work, DKNY is J.C. Penny. It’s a rich neighbourhood, littered with boutiques that each employ one thin, bored girl to stock three hand-stitched dresses in a white room with exposed ceiling beams. Sometimes there are price tags but mostly it’s a surprise. But to someone from a culture of bargain-bragging, any shop refusing to legitimize the term “BOGO” is suspect, elitist, and ridiculous.

The DKNY shopping experience was new for me, and an enlightening one. For example, I learned that you get Wurthers candies thrown in your bag. I dare you to tell me that’s not worth upwards of $188! I also learned that no matter where you shop, there are going to be things you like, things you don’t like, and things covered in sequins, which as we all know, fall somewhere delightfully in-between.

Wearing my shirt (or “blouse” as elegant women call them) today though, feels pretty sweet. I am in a dry-clean-only kinda mood. Which is to say: posh. Even though I spilled my lunch on it already, miraculously in two separate frontal hemispheres, and even though I’m acutely aware it costs more because of the label, not because the Chinese children sewing it are making any more money, I’m feeling fancy. It’s like they always say: dress for the job you want, especially if the job you want is to wear expensive clothes that you didn’t technically pay for.