Repeat

I've said all this before, but I think it was put better this time in this way - from a post today on a writig board, where someone asked what gives with people dismissing others' livings as "only a (fill-in-the-blank: stay at home mom, whatever the peon)":


It has a fair amount to do with culturally ingrained snobbery, and - not to be more strident than I usually am, but frankly - gender.

I myself am a secretary. That's the word I choose to use, though other people find it 'demeaning'. I say that secretary is an office which has been around for over half a millennium, and the word wasn't ruined until the past two generations, when jokes about lecherous bosses and brainless twinkies in heels became synonymous. Me, I find Administrative Assistant a fairly weak substitute, but at the end of the day I really don't care about my title. Give me my projects, I will manage them (that's really what it is, but I don't feel any need to be called a PM either), shut up and pay me.

My new title is Senior Administration Specialist, which simultaneously pleases and cracks me so completely up. I mean, wow, someone felt defensive. Heh.

People almost invariably marvel that I am "okay" with "just" being a secretary. I had to explain to one of my recent-ex coworkers, so horrified when our company laid me off that he was forwarding listings for Other Positions I Could Aspire To, that honey, I'm an admin, that's no accident, I've been at it 25 years, and thank you so much but that's not second best - and IT'S NOT AN ACCIDENT. It's not because I never knew I could "do better" and it's a decision, not incidentally, made by that very same intelligence this person was praising so fulsomely.

Not every company is like my previous employer, entirely unaware that a person can simultaneously be intelligent AND an Admin. Good grief, I'm even ambitious, though where it came from I can hardly tell you.