jeysiec:
Nothing irritates me more than how undervalued secretaries are. Especially when it gets dismissed as “answering a phone”.
No, being a receptionist is “answering a phone”. A secretary basically coordinates all the information in an office to ensure that everybody has what they need to do all their jobs properly. And occasionally does some bits of those jobs, too. (I’ve done stuff like some aspects of accounts receivable, accounts payable, IT and tech support, sign construction, and stationary and form design, among other weird random things.)
And there’s just so many issues that I get inflicted on me or my mom by the local social services agencies that could easily be solved by them hiring a competent secretary versus forcing their various field agents and other workers to handle their own paperwork and information organization piecemeal.
And yet the secretary is often considered the most expendable person in a place, seen as easily replaceable via foisting the paperwork and information organization onto said separate workers. Which inevitably actually results in all sorts of messes because unsurprisingly your specialists have to spend so much time on their specialized jobs that they often skimp on the behind the scenes organization part. And then they’re missing their appointments, screwing up the customers’ paperwork and information in numerous ways, having the left hand not knowing what the right is doing, and so on.
Seriously, stop it, people. Hire a secretary. We need the work, and trust me, you need us doing that work, because you’re driving us insane as customers with how much your non-secretaries fuck up doing the secretarial work, which then results in them fucking up their work more often.
(via argumate)
3 months ago · tagged #specialization of labour: it exists for a reason #nothing to add but tags · 39 notes · source: jeysiec · .permalink
ozymandias271:
anyway here is my point. the whole “not being a dickbag to trans people requires A TON OF WORK AND CHECKING OF PRIVILEGE” narrative:
(a) lets transphobes off the hook
(b) is insulting to non-transphobic cis people
© leads some non-transphobic cis people to hate themselves
(d) leads other non-transphobic cis people to talk about how NOBLE they are because they have learned NOT TO ASK ABOUT ACQUAINTANCES’ GENITALS! SO HARD!
(e) lends credence to “trans* is transphobic!” nonsense because keeping track of a constantly shifting set of shibboleths actually is hard
and it is super-weird because while SJ legitimately might not care about (b)-(e) you would think they would at least manage to avoid (a)
Also, it’s incompatible with “not being a dickbag is such elementary stuff that it’s literally the basic minimum prerequisite for being a decent human being, not something you deserve extra credit ally cookies over”. Consistency, how does one do it.
I personally possibly endorse having a distinction between the layperson-accessible low-hanging fruit that should be an obligation to people, and the expert-level follow-the-theory-to-weird-places-to-see-if-there’s-something-there stuff that (e) kind of is about but with more self-awareness.
Physics would be an apt comparison; the layperson needs to know enough to not cause harm via bad policy or shitty decisions, and then there’s the experts who do things like “let’s check out if the universe is actually an 11-dimensional hologram and see what the implications would be for stuff we could engineer out of it, and also if you don’t know what you’re doing just don’t do it because we don’t want people doing really embarrassing amateur quantum physics”.
All in all SJ needs to acknowledge that this distinction is possible and allowable and not everyone should try to be an expert in hardcore intersectionalist gender theory any more than people need to be experts in quantum physics. I suspect a lot of the frustration around (e) comes from people thinking they need to keep track of constantly shifting shibboleths but can’t do it that well, but can’t admit it because of signaling pressures to keep up with the cutting edge and as a result end up sounding like Deepak Chopra when they espouse what’s basically a cargo-cult version of last year’s cutting edge instead of being like “I’m not an expert in this stuff but I trust the physicists when they say nuclear power isn’t actually that horrible” as they should.
It’s probably useful to have some small subset of people chasing theory to weird places just to see if there are some useful insights to be found, but they should recognize that that’s what it is and that it’s a completely different thing from the minimum criteria for a decent human being. Also, this feels like an interesting hack for replacing the stick with a carrot; instead of being just barely decent human beings while everyone else is horribly failing at it the experts could feel like high-status people who are successfully doing something cool and rare while others are okay too, and only the ones who do the Deepak Chopra quantum physics woo equivalent of gender theory, like TERFs, need to be scorned.
[epistemic status: literally inconclusive but feeling like putting some strong intuitions into words and generating important insights]
4 months ago · tagged #specialization of labour: it exists for a reason #steel feminism · 46 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink