The Office: The Spice of Life

Day 24 of the 31 for 21 Challenge

From the desk of Cathy Harvey, Administrative Assistant

I recently attended a featured session on “The Lure and Lore of Spices” at a local library in Mundelein, Illinois led by Tom and Patty Erd who are spice merchants.  They’ve had a family business since 1957 and travel the world purchasing spices for their stores in Illinois and Wisconsin. Fascinating!  They had an ancient-looking world map to regale us with stories, history and folklore, separating the fact from the fiction.  (Pepper, not salt, is the king of spices and cinnamon is sawdust from the bark of the cinnamon tree.)  Their pointer for the map was a 3-foot long stick of cinnamon!  The Erds opened a cabinet of stories that kept us spellbound.  Their specialty after years of experience is creating spice blends based on local culture.  They know just how to spice up a meal with fragrant and unique blends.

There’s a good bit of spice in my life here at Shepherds.  The broad variety of things I am asked to do in my role as the Administrative Assistant spice up what could be an otherwise mundane role.  Besides coordinating travel for 45+ students every holiday and summer break, besides posting and mailing report cards, and planning much of the graduation week, here are some of the unusual tasks I’ve been asked to do that put a little kick in my office life!

·         Day 1 on the job – “Go around and check every apartment to make sure there are no problems and no one is fighting with each other.”  (WHAT???  I don’t know what to do to break up a fight! I thought I’d be filing and typing, stuff like that).  The Dean wasn’t talking about fist fights; she meant helping students cope with new school year stress--something like, if one student took someone’s cereal bowl off the counter and it upset another student who did not know how to handle it or think of an alternate solution.  Help them work through it.  (Day 1 on the job, I did not know the students and had not yet worked with students with disabilities.)

·         Week 1 on the job – “Can you come up with a Fitness plan for all the students, with charts for each one of them and a destination we can go to, with anything you want to advertise this?  And we need that by Monday.”

·         “Schedule a tour of the Capitol in Madison, and a trip to the zoo, and Olbrich Gardens.”

·         “Go outside and find nature items.”

·         “Take pictures.”

·         “Call the church hosting the Bethlehem Market and ask them to please turn off the strobe light when we come through.”

·         “Find out where we can get foreign currency in Yen for our student flying home and connecting through Tokyo. Try the bank down the street, call Milwaukee Airport, call O’Hare, try the Triple A in Racine, how ‘bout the one in Brookfield, or try Wauwatosa; make me a summary so we can email the parents all the options.”

·         “Go to the area hotels and check them out for cleanliness and amenities, so we can book rooms for Orientation.”

·         “Make a chart of what every student is doing for Christmas break, including who’s picking them up, what time they are leaving, what they need to pack, if they get meds, what flight, what airport, what time, what driver, who’s bringing them back, what day and time, and print gate pass letters so we can walk them all the way to the plane. Oh, and if they have a connecting flight, make a letter for that too so they don’t get lost, and make sure it has all their flight information.  Then make bag breakfasts for everyone on the day they are leaving so they don’t mess up their clean apartments before break, and go buy the food too - here’s a list - and find out what they all like to drink for juice.”

·         “I need a balloon and a rock, like a pretty big rock.  I need a robe and a wad of money.”

·         “Drive the students to O’Hare Airport.”

·         “Please look online and see if the eggs in this carton were part of the recall; one of our students got very sick immediately after eating eggs this morning.”

·         “Cathy, I need about a 1/4 cup of mud, but not soil because I don’t want it to have any fertilizers or chemicals.  I want to put it on someone’s face.”

·         From a student during 8 a.m. med pass: “Mrs. Harvey, can you please check our toilet?  It’s been running for about 35 minutes.”

·         “Cathy, can you please go up to the Findley Center and get my keys; I left them in the freezer.”  Imagine my puzzled expression, “You left them in the freezer?”  “Yes, I think I left them in there when I was getting ice.  I shut the door and forgot them.  Joy found them this morning”

A little spice never hurt anyone, right?

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