The Slam and Scream: And Other Powerful Strategies and Career Moves for Secretaries, Assistants, and Anyone Else Who Has Had Enough

Customer Reviews

However, I also felt the author had a negative attitude toward secretarial work. If she doesn't want to be a secretary, fine; be something else. Those of us who have chosen to make secretarial work a career chose it because we LIKE it. While I have worked for some lousy bosses, I have also worked for some terrific ones, and most of the people I have worked for have treated me with respect and appreciation. Truthfully, I find the stereotype of secretarial work being demeaning to be quite tiresome; but rather than refuting it, Ms. Sargent seems to be reinforcing it with her attitude.

By the way, I did the "Slam and Scream" on my tyrant of a lawyer boss almost three years before reading this book. LOL Osmosis? But a year or so later I landed my current position, as secretary to a religious official, and it is the secretarial job I intend to retire from.

She sees secretarial work as a sort of "Twins Syndrome" after the movie Twins in which one twin Arnold Schwarzenegger gets all the brawn, brains and success and the other twin Danny DeVito gets what's left over, which ain't much. DeVito's role is described as a sort of side effect -- when the embryo split, it left him with all the unwanted features. Carole feels the secretary's traditional role -- that of making the boss look good but obliterating herself -- is one in which the secretary gets be a sort of side effect. Carole notes the secretary's role is to help her boss get ahead but not to have any goals herself and that no other working partnership relationship "demands this of one partner. In every other employer-employee duo, the two work for their mutual professional advancement, [but] with the boss and the administrative assistant, the assistant stays behind while the boss gets ahead."

Her advice: Don't get into secretarial work in the first place. But if you're in it, find ways to work well in it. Like work for partners in a law firm and not associates. And never work for an office manager (they have no power). Go back to school. Pick up other skills. "You may already be out of your trap and just not know it. If you can imagine yourself doing something else for a living, you're most of the way there.... Remember that all you need to have a career instead of a mere job is a sense of where you want to go....Relentlessly promote yourself, give yourself a resume that looks like a professional, and, above all, try like the dickens....Don't give up...."

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