more work please

I have recently become a terribly incompetent secretary. I am not a very organized person. I love files and boxes, post-its, folders, and mail slots. However, they haven't advanced much beyond the decorative stage in my daily life. At work I am called to use these beloved articles for the purposed for which they were made. This, it turns out, is harder than it seems.

My personal short-comings aside, my job is made much much more difficult by the fact that I rarely am given enough work to do. My employer, labouring under the impression that I am about as intelligent as rather bright sparrow, consistently gives me work that would last about fifteen minutes. She then leaves the office for long periods of time, so I am unable to ask for more work. And when she is there, she manages to give the impression that she is very very busy, faar too busy to give more work to the student secretary. This is accompanied by a how-could-you-possibly-be finished-all-that-work-yet look that is liberally laced with you-did-a-lousy-job suspicion. So, I am getting good at stretching small amounts of work into half-a-day projects. This is an extremely tedious exercise. In the process I have "accidentally" deleted whole pages, redundantly typed out department contact lists, and needlessly rolled around behind my desk on my lovely rollery chair. I have also become extremely proficient at using the labelmaker and spend my extra minutes labeling everything in sight.

All this caused me to wonder: is it really that hard to make a reasonably long list of jobs? Perhaps hiring people you apparently have no real work for is a waste of money? (NOT that I am complaining as I really needed a job.)

In a suprising turn of events, I hope that tomorrow brings more work.