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Sounds like you're thinking of "receptionist". Secrataries then did all the things you attribute to administrative assistants now. I actually had a secratary

Sounds like you're thinking of "receptionist". Secrataries then did all the things you attribute to administrative assistants now. I actually had a secratary at my first job out of school, albeit a shared one between a dozen of us. It was awesome. Think of it as having "The Internet", but with a flawless voice interface, combined with a service to take away every trivial nuisance unrelated to the core of your job. You'd pick up the phone, say "I need to fly to LA on Wednesday morning, returning Friday evening", and a few hours later an envelope with airline tickets, hotel reservation and rental car details would appear on your desk. Until you mentioned it, I hadn't thought about how much I miss having that.

kyllo 14y ago
Yes, having one in your workplace is quite nice. There's a good reason why secretaries/admin assistants exist, and it's this: Would you rather pay a secretary $30-50k per year to do others' administrative, clerical, and scheduling tasks, or would you rather make your executives who you're paying six to seven figures do it all themselves, cutting into their time for the much more valuable work you hired them to do? It's expensive to employ a person just for the purpose of doing clerical work for everyone else, but what's more expensive is the productivity hit you take when you force all your senior employees and officers to do it themselves. A lot of companies have forgotten this in their misguided attempts to improve the bottom line by reducing headcount.