Monday, July 21, 2008

Secretarial celebration

I'm dancing around my desk today for a very simple reason: I have a secretary! Okay, she's not quite my secretary yet, but she has been offered the job and accepted it, and in a few weeks she'll move from another campus office to the desk just outside my door--and none too soon if you ask me.

I didn't realize how much I depended on my secretary until this summer, when I've spent a good bit of my office time doing things the secretary normally does. I don't mind fetching the mail or emptying the water out of the dehumidifier so the copier paper won't stick together, but I really don't want to be responsible for programming the departmental budget codes into the new photocopier or submitting the monthly credit card report to the business office.

The new secretary is exactly the person we wanted from the start, which makes me wonder why we went to all the trouble to weed through the pile of resumes (many of them awful--a person who can't figure out how to format a Word document or attach a file to an e-mail message is simply not qualified to serve as an academic secretary) or interview those two other candidates.

But that's all over now. I am delighted with my incipient secretary and I eagerly await her arrival in my outer office...now all I need to do is find a way to assuage the grief of the office that's losing her. Zucchini to the rescue again!

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