For the modern woman in the workforce, it isn’t enough to merely show up and do your job. You have a responsibility to mother your male colleagues by performing the most rudimentary and inane tasks, which they are incapable of or unwilling to perform. Whether you’re an entry-level employee, a senior manager, or the CEO, adding these secretarial tasks to your already jam-packed day is certain to improve the lives of your co-workers, even though it’s not your job at all:
1. Write impossibly thorough notes during every meeting and don’t complain.
Your male colleagues are really great at talking over you; but you’re really great at listening to everything they say and instantly writing it down. Uncanny! You should be flattered every time ask you to log each of their brilliant, creatively recycled ideas on the whiteboard. Lean the hell in, girl — your penmanship is too adorable to keep to yourself! In fact, maybe you could find the time to handwrite all the CEO’s thank you notes to his funders. Look at you, going above and entirely, beyond the scope of—wait, what was your actual job again?
2. Answer the phone—any phone!
You ladies love gabbing on the phone, so why not get not-paid to do it? When the phone rings, put aside those silly blueprints you’re drafting or stem cells you’re studying and pick up that phone that nobody else is answering! Your effortless ability to offer pleasant and accommodating service makes you so very valuable in the workplace. Except when it comes to important things, like wooing big clients. That more partial to rugged, masc—and hey, the phone is ringing!
3. Bring in baked goods to remind everybody that you’re ambitious but still motherly.
After a long day in the office, what more do you want to do than cook up some cinnamon raisin cookies from scratch and not eat a single one, and bring them into the office the next day for your coworkers? If somebody remembers to thank you, laugh it off as “no big deal, and PLEASE don’t make me eat them all!” What a fun, low-key way to show off your domestic side! Feminine flair: the one thing none of your male colleagues will drunkenly claim to be better at than you.
4. Organize every office birthday party.
As the only person in the office who needs to be concerned about being likable, you’ll obviously get to do all the party planning! And don’t half-ass it, either—Gavin’s birthday only comes once a year, just like Kim and Pete and Cliff and Pete M’s. Sure, everybody’s birthdays really clog up your calendar, but what do you do here, anyway? Well the administrative assistant would never even think about doing this on his own, so I guess it’s still your job.
As you eat cake and pray that everyone pays for their share for Jeb’s football-shaped ice cream cake, take a moment to congratulate yourself on doing things this far below your pay scale. If this whole “senior partner” thing doesn’t work out, you’ll always have something to fall back on!
