Oct 20
Being a Personal Assistant for a College Student
Posted by editor at 4:20 am in workplace notes
You know that being a college student can be difficult, right? That’s why you need a personal assistant. At least one Georgetown undergraduate thinks that he does. What’s truly amazing is that this student isn’t actually willing to pay for your time in full:
Tasks such as doing laundry that involve a lot of waiting around (time when you could be doing other tasks or doing your own stuff) will be counted for the approximate amount of time it would take to do the labor involved. For instance, laundry will be counted for half an hour even though a laundry cycle takes 1.5 hrs to complete.
It’s a good thing we’re not all paid like that! Other tasks include making the student’s bed, organizing the closet, and picking him up from work.
October 20th, 2009 at 4:51 am
Oh! I saw this. Snide comments from you were in my head the whole time I read it.
October 20th, 2009 at 5:38 am
What’s interesting to me is that it suggests that the student either has never had a housekeeper or paid absolutely no attention to how the housekeepers he has had do their work.
My housekeeper puts the laundry on to wash, cleans other stuff for awhile, then dries the laundry, goes back to cleaning other stuff, then folds the laundry and puts it away.
But yeah, this article was widely mocked at Georgetown.
October 20th, 2009 at 6:39 am
Well, that’s how *I* do housework. Put in the laundry, and then start another task. So do we think the student simply doesn’t ever do laundry so he doesn’t know?
October 20th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Well, my thought was that if he hasn’t had a housekeeper in the past he put on laundry, goofed off, put it on to dry, goofed off more, then took it out and folded it. That’s how I did my laundry in college and being used to that routine might lead one to the belief that the goofing off was part of the way people do laundry.