Certainly the season for some resourceful cold callers too.  In the last two weeks I have had urgent calls for my boss (who they ask for by first name, always a giveaway as noone is that informal here!) from the 'Assistant to Sir Trevor MacDonald' (?), the head of the Department of Transport who couldn't give me a number because they were 'shooting out of the office in five mins' and the 'Cabinet Office' = "It is urgent I speak to boss this decision must be made total with fail". Me: "He's on holiday". 'Cabinet Office': "I'll call back another time".

At least I hope they were cold callers....

My 6 year old nephew summed it up for me over Christmas:

"Auntie what is your job?"
"I'm a PA"
"What is a PA?"
"Well, I have a Boss, and I look after him by answering his phone, going to meetings for him, writing letters for him and making him tea"
*Moments silence to contemplate this*
"So you are a slave?"

I am the only person in our company authorised to book our board room.  It has been that way for years as it was always supposed to be available for shareholder/director use and as other people in the office might not be aware of when the shareholders are likely to want it has always gone through the Exec PA.  That way there is no embarrassment of being unceremoniously turfed out of the room as I know used to happen at one National Housebuilder in the UK! But I suspect we are unusual as most companies will have their meetings planned and diarised in advance whereas we chop and change ours at short notice.  And yes that means sometimes you can have a person desperately searching for a meeting room while the board room stands empty.

You should be on commission!  Are you allowed to tell me who they are on this board?  I am in the market for a new TMC at the moment.

I sit in my own office directly outside my bosses office and screen his calls.  Some of his senior reports have his DDI or his mobile but most people call me to ascertain his availability.  Plus we are deluged with cold callers asking to speak to the most senior director so I act as gatekeeper. I can't think of a worse waste of my bosses time than field the cold callers I have to deal with, particularly those who think the CEO of a multi million pound company would be responsible for mobile phone contracts.

Although my title is Exec PA, I am not really a PA as I support the CEO, Chairman, President, FD and Commercial Director.  I only have one Line Manager though, the CEO, so he is my secret priority over the others.

Interesting topic... my official title is 'Exec PA' - for a start I hate 'Exec' and much prefer 'Executive', also I work for four different directors so am not technially a 'PA', I consider myself an 'Executive Assistant' but that title is considered too senior to use at our company.  Conversely, I go out of my way to refer to my work as 'admin' when liaising with colleagues so they don't think I am too big for my boots and think of myself as 'director' level - it is difficult because you work with the most senior people with the most confidential subjects but it is still an administrative function which has always had, wrongly in my opinion, dirisory overtones.   

I seem to always get asked to put in money for the collection for someone leaving, which I do, but never seem to get invited to the leaving party!  Got to the point now where I ask the person who did the collection, 'So what did I end up buying so and so for their leaving present?'  Ha ha childish I know but satisfying.

I just completed an NVQ Level 2 in IT which was a very useful course, I learnt how to get a lot more out of Office 2009 packages like Excel Word and Powerpoint, applications I already considered myself expert in.  It showed me the right way of doing things which actually turned out to be more efficient than my self taught ways. It also fitted in to my daily job as for most of the course work I submitted documents I was working on anyway for my company so it didn't take up any of my own time.

I am in that situ now, I officially finish work in 15 mins, but my boss is still in a meeting and as I lent him a laptop to use in his meeting I don't want to leave until I have got it back.  Not that anything would happen to it but knowing my luck...

What industries do you work in?  I work in Construction in the UK and considering how bad things are supposed to be redundancies haven't been mentioned as yet.

I used to create a monthly spreadsheet of all travel and accomodation that had been booked by our divison for my MD to look at. But I also used to create a monthly spreadsheet showing what had been spent on the credit card which was the exact same information.  It was just always done that way and until I took it over no one had questioned the duplication or recognised the waste of time.  Sometimes you need some fresh eyes to identify uneccesary tasks.