I have dreams of hiring a personal assistant. I’ve had these dreams for years and years, and as time goes on, I add more to the assistant’s list. I may need two assistants at this point. At first, I just wanted someone to do my filing and make sure my bills were paid. Then, I realized it would be helpful to have someone keep my iPod up to date — burn all my CDs, buy the latest songs so I could be hip, and organize it all into folders so that when I went to the gym, I would have access to anything I wanted. ABBA? No problem. NSYNC? Right here in the “hip” folder. NSYNC is still hip, right?
Now I realize that my assistant needs to be a programmer. My server crashed a couple of weeks ago and all my sites went down. Yesterday, I noticed that this blog was down because the database was corrupted. Because of comment spam. I spent most of today fixing my database and backing up my files and upgrading WordPress. I got amazingly sad when I thought that I had lost most of my posts, but then I realized that my archives just aren’t displaying things quite right. I guess I need to keep tweaking my upgrade. But if I had my super fantastic assistant, this would all be done for me!
If I’m going to get a programmer, I may as well get someone who can sort out my investments too. I will end up old and poor and fighting my cats for their food if I don’t figure out the money thing soon.
My assistant could follow me around, make sure I have snacks and bottles of water. My assistant would have watched out for me when I walked away from my purse in Las Vegas last week. Or, if my assistant had been off that day, I still would have someone to track down all those phone numbers I’d gathered over the years and put them into my new phone. Maybe my assistant could have even waited at the driver’s license office for me. (Did you know that when your license is stolen, you can’t just get another license? You have to take the eye test and get a new picture even if you were POSITIVE that you could just reorder the old one and therefore went down to the office in sweats, no makeup, and uncombed hair? My assistant would have known that.)
My assistant would make sure I always had plastic bags at the airport — just the right kind with the ziploc and the one quart and the extra security so I would never have to go without chapstick again.
My dream assistant is a high school student (probably a senior and has already taken all of those programming and investment classes) who overjoyed to work for $5 an hour. I’m sure that once word gets out, I’ll have applicants lined up down the road. If only I had an assistant to post the job for me.