Being A Good Receptionist: Part 2

As I have mentioned in other posts I am a receptionist and administrative assistant for a growing company. My tasks day to day vary largely but mostly come down to a few things: 1) being polite and courteous, 2) being knowledgeable about the company I work for, and 3) being open and available to help out almost all of the time.

The second thing on my list is a little bit more complicated and usually comes down to experience and a willingness to gather information. You will get questions from callers about the company and for different people and sometimes people are going to need to get the answers from you. If you are a temp it would be understandable for you to not know how to answer every question that comes to you, but it’s more important to know who to go to in order to answer those questions. And of course, it should go without mention that the longer you are in a certain position/ office the more you should know about it.

Lastly, your job as an administrative assistant is, by its nature, to assist. Learn how to prioritize, and who to prioritize for. I am an admin. for the entire office, and my office my tasks are based on first come first serve basis for all but one VP. Also, I’ve been given the right to say “no” when a project comes along that I don’t have time for. I love that. It is not secret that to be an admin. you need to be a organized person, if you aren’t become one. Make lists, create a filing system for your tasks, and know where and what they mean.

All in all the most important parts of being a receptionist and administrative assistant come down to personality, knowledge, and organization. Even if your goal isn’t to be the best receptionist to grace the office system, it could be an opening in to another position if you work it right.

Being A Good Receptionist: Part 1

As I have mentioned in the past I am a receptionist and administrative assistant for a growing company. I have been working in this office for a year and a half now, and I started here as a lowly temp in a completely separate position. I often caught a glimpse of the girl that they had at the front desk, and at the time it always seemed to me like she could care less about the job or the company. I remember thinking to myself at the time “how could she have this job?” She looked miserable, unprofessional, and as if she didn’t care. Turned out that she didn’t last long, and I was asked to take the job because I had demonstrated that I was a hard worker in my temp position. In other words: that when the receptionist is unhappy and unprofessional it presents a bad first impression of the company.

Let’s look at it from the other side – the guest. The guest comes in to interview for a job opening and is dressed in a suit and tie and greets the receptionist who is wearing ratty jeans, a t-shirt and a zip up hoody. How does that look to the guest? It looks like an unprofessional office or maybe even makes him feel over dressed. All in all he feels uncomfortable already and maybe he’s thinking this isn’t the kind of office he thought it was. Even if the office is casual with no strict dress code, as mine is, the receptionist should dress on the nicer side of business casual to be, if nothing else, an equilibrium between the company and the guest. The executives in my office frequently wear jeans and a polo shirt if they have no outside meetings that day but I always make it a point to wear dress slacks or well tailored jeans and a blouse.

Another first impression about the company is formed by the guest when the receptionist greets them. This one should be obvious: Smile, say “Hello, how can I help you?” and go from there. It is not too hard to be nice to someone who you will like only interface with for ten minutes or so. I like to update the guest on the status of the person they are meeting with: “They will be right up.” Or “He/she is finishing up a meeting/ phone call and will be with you shortly.” Just so the guest knows if they will be waiting a tremendously long time or not.

The front office area is the domain of the receptionist. Take care of the people that come through it to the best of your ability because you never know when it could benefit you.

Read more in Part 2.

Eat the View

This Lawn is Your Lawn from roger doiron on Vimeo.

More in Eat the view: Part 2.

The Bibliophile's Dilemma

As 2009 loomed around the corner I had decided to abstain from the annual tradition of having a New Year’s Resolution. This decision came mostly as a result of my own cynicism and a deep seeded bitterness that “they never really work out anyway”. In past years my resolutions have been either loosely worded with vague meaning (i.e. “I will take better care of myself.”), or something that I have been working on for a long time (i.e. “I will try to buy more organic produce.”) and would likely continue to work on it with out any though to “that’s my resolution!”. In the end, like most resolutions and attempts to better one’s own life, they work out or they don’t. So we can’t say that I necessarily resolved to not make a resolution, because that’s just silly, but the fact that it’s the beginning of a new year and the fact that I stumbled upon this article has sparked a thought in me.

It has been a goal of mine, as it is with many bibliophiles, to read the classics. I am sad to discover that I have only read a mere eight books on that list. At least four of the books were in the top ten. I want to increase the number of books on the list that I have read, but it is not going to happen easily – I am a slow reader and am part of a book group that tends to read more recent publications. On top of that it is impossible for me to read two fiction books at the same time – I tend to get the plots confused. (I know what you’re thinking how did this woman graduate from college with an English degree? Very careful planning. ) I know, I know it’s all the same excuses to not accomplish the aforementioned goal, but I didn’t set a time line on it, nor did I necessarily resolve to do it. Just because I want to at some point accomplish this, and it just happens to be at the beginning of a New Year, that doesn’t make it a resolution. Right? Perhaps purely by my say so it is not a resolution but more of a desire for accomplishment.

Now my internal devil’s advocate says, who dictated that those books find their way to the list of top 100 books of all time? I am sure that these choices were based upon some literary prowess based on style, plot development, word usage, and proper punctuation, but you have to know that someone somewhere would disagree with their choices. It looks like Time Magazine did on a few. So then, what is a book lover to do? Follow someone else’s arbitrary list, or determine one of my own?
That’s it. I know exactly what my non-resolution for 2009 will be. I will read whatever I want to read.

A Blog About Blogs

I feel as if maybe I have traversed to an ultra lame topic here, but it has been almost a month since my last post and Gods be damned if I go a month without submitting something bordering on intelligent thought to the web world.

I like to surf the web and read other blogs on occasion – okay, quite frequently. In fact, I have a list of about ten blogs which I read frequently. One or two of them are just funny pictures and things that make me laugh, like the Cake Wreck blog (http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com) for example, another is someone local that I admire, like Marc Acito (www.marcacito.com) who is doing something new every day for a year, and others are blogs that search through other blogs for interesting stuff. The thing I like about these blogs and the others that I read, and many of the other popular blogs out there, is that they cater (if you will) to a specific niche interest. These blogs rarely if ever go off the topic of what they were designed for, and that is their draw. So I couldn’t help but think what my blog’s draw is. Not that it much matters since I’m writing it more for myself than anyone else. At least that’s what I like to tell myself anyway.

I’ve been blogging in one form or another for quite a few years now. The former incarnations of my blogs have been something similar to the boring teenage chatter one might find on MySpace, which is partly why I started this one. At the time, and perhaps still, I was struggling with a quarter-life crisis – trying to figure out where in the world I belong now that I was done with school. Well, now that I’ve found my place in the world for the time being, I keep this blog going as I evolve, knowing that I will never be a finished product and that someone else might get some solace in my experiences. Trust me, I’m not getting full of myself or my writing abilities here. All I can do is just write, think I’m saying something valuable, and just be who I am.

John Cleese, How Do I love Thee...

I was prowling the internet, as I am want to do from time to time, and I discovered that John Cleese has his own blog (I don’t know why I am so surprised by this, all the kids are doin’ it!), and I found this lovely jewel within its webby pages penned by Mr. Cleese:

Ode to Sean Hannity

Aping urbanity,
Oozing with vanity,
Plump as a manatee,
Faking humanity,
Intellectual inanity,
Journalistic calamity,
Fox Noise insanity,
You’re a profanity,
Hannity

Oh, my heart jumps in my chest. I’m sure Hannity has had that joy of such an easily rhyme-able name for the entirety of his life, but you can’t say he didn’t bring it on himself!

I’ve been a Python fan from the moment I knew of their existence (Holy Grail is one of my favorite movies!), and enjoy John Cleese whenever he includes himself on a film (see: Rat Race), and when he would make guest appearances on TV shows that I already enjoy. I seriously need to have a look through his IMDB credits and have my very own Cleese film festival.

I must also admit that my radar had been raised for him recently as the Python boys recently started their own YouTube channel. Truly I have needed something lately to make me giggle, and that’s just the ticket.

NaNoWriMo is taking it out of me lately… even after my little venture off to the coast to write for four days. On schedule to break 40k words tonight (3 days worth of writing ahead of schedule) and if I’m really good I’ll get this thing blown out of the water before turkey day hits.

A little story

So, apparently I like to start my day by thoroughly embarrassing myself… I had just gotten my first cup of coffee for the morning and was walking back to my desk being careful not to spill the hot liquid on my hand or elsewhere, when something happened just as I got to my desk and the new VP of Marketing walks in the door … and I spill half of my mug of coffee all over the place, on my desk, on the floor, on my chair, on my pants, and – most importantly on my hand. Burning hot coffee on my hand. It takes all of my focus to not drop my mug on the floor and just put it on my desk, excuse myself and run to the bathroom to rinse my hand under cold water and get some paper towels before I help him. Yeah, I’m awesome…

The Results Are In!

Last night after the election results came in overwhelmingly in favor of Obama, I couldn’t help but be excited. This is the first election since I have been eligible to vote where the man I chose to go to office won – and not just by a little bit. I will be honest, as I have no reason to do otherwise; I’m not really all that in to politics. I believe it my right and duty as an American Woman to vote. As I was telling my coworker, FlatEarth, 90% of the time I don’t really care what’s going on in Washington DC and will generally avoid political topics mostly because I don’t know enough to hold up an intelligent end of the conversation. But I digress.

I had an overwhelming sense of dread going in to Election Day yesterday. I think my sense of optimism was murdered by the previous presidential election when the bushman was put back in office for a second term. Being that I’m not really politically minded, I hadn’t been checking the opinion polls, I hadn’t been reading up on the details and checking political blogs to see what others were thinking I just went in to the day hopeful that our country would go the direction it needed to go.

I was diligently working on my NaNoWriMo novel, trying my damndest to ignore the poles and just get the thing done. I didn’t expect that they would have the results as quickly as they did. I had gotten to 500 words of my 1700 words and clicked over to the NBC website to check the standing at the polls. At that moment the website reloaded to show that Obama was over the 270 electoral votes needed to win and I couldn’t help but scream: “Holy crap!” I ran out to the family room and turned on the TV and sat down in time for them to repeat what I had just seen come over the internet. To say I was elated would be a mild description of my emotions of the moment. I continued to watch completely ignoring anything else that needed to be done while Hubby watched his Twitter feed repeating the funny comments to me.

Several things strike me about the McCain rally/ concession speech versus the Obama rally / acceptance speech and I think that the things that stood out to me are emblematic of the type of person or leader that each would be. McCain’s rally was in a private ballroom in Arizona with an invitation only crowd, this screams exclusiveness to me. Obama’s Rally was in an open air park in Chicago – anyone and everyone could have shown up, this speaks to an open willingness to be comprehensive in everything that he does. As for their speeches, both were eloquent, but the really telling thing to me was the crowd’s response when one would mention the other’s name. While McCain’s concession speech was gracious and supportive of Obama his crowd was considerably less so, booing whenever Obama’s name was mentioned and at one point chanting “We want John” while he was speaking. I can understand their disappointment with the loss of their chosen candidate and perhaps meant this as a way to cheer him up, but in my opinion those tactics are childish. The attitude was of course more celebratory during Obama’s speech but everyone in the thousands gathered was respectful and listened quietly and even cheered once or twice when he mentioned McCain. I believe they saying goes: “you are judged by the company you keep.”

I look forward to President-Elect Obama taking office on January 20, 2009.