The hard yards

My job at Alzheimer’s Australia WA has seen me cover a wide range of tasks.

 

There is your basic stuff, things like press releases or emails. We’re sending out a stream of emails, and I’ll write the draft, and/or tailor each one for the specific paper.  This isn’t always as simple as a mail-merge.  For example, during our Access Economics campaign, I had to insert the correct statistical numbers into each release.  It’s menial, tedious but important work. (It’s also frustrating.  Anything involving staring at tables of numbers is frustrating)

 

There are other jobs that are slightly less specialised.  Alzheimer’s Australia prints and distributes information flyers for medical clinic hospital waiting rooms.  My task: sort the thousands of flyers into little groups of 20.  Then there was last week, where printer which normally folds the mail malfunctioned, leaving me to help another lady fold a few hundred letters into envelopes.

 

There’s a certain technique to folding mail which we’re not taught at Curtin.  I wonder if we are really get our money’s worth from our education.

 

Once, one of the ladies in the office needed to load boxes of documents into the car.  Enter stage left, the strapping young male intern, good for lifting heavy things.

 

But jokes aside, it’s important to do the hard yards, not simply because it’s your job, but also to prove you are reliable and competent. 

 

At the other end of the job-importance scale, I was once assigned to write a letter to the editors of the newspapers that ran a story based on our release, to thank them and compliment the journalist. 

 

My proudest moment, in my second last week at work, was being asked to write an editorial comment for a newspaper on behalf of the CEO.  ‘Here’s the message Frank wants to focus on, they’ve given us 300 words, can you come up with something for him?’

 

This sort of task, they don’t just hand out to fresh interns.  It’s a big responsibility that is in its own way, a compliment.

 

I guess I should embed a lesson into this post, so I’ll say this: If you want the important jobs, you need to show you are competent and reliable, and you show that by doing the tedious, menial jobs well, with a cheerful attitude.

 

For the record, having a great boss helps!