[rabbitheart]

I am not a secretary, but like the author was raised in a similar environment: It was my mother who took me to work in her small, dark offices where she taught me to type and file as she worked. We couldn't afford daycare. I became a highly efficient mini-secretary. I took similar jobs in high school/college.

Although I work as a technical writer/sysadmin, I often find myself using the skills my mother taught me to organize, keep track of projects, etc. We're a small company, and I'm the only one with any decent office administration skills. Right now my main desire (and after-work project) is developing a system for internal information I can take to my boss and coworkers to hopefully improve productivity/prevent everyone from pinging everyone else with dumb questions. (I'm weighing my options. I'd enjoy something like a well-configured Confluence [at my last job Confluence died a lot -- but it was easy and effective from a user standpoint], and am looking at open-source alternatives I can use as a base.)

I don't think I would be able to look at the company I work for and figure out what we need in terms of "getting our shit together" if I didn't know secretary work, honestly.