I just spoke with a friend of mine from Detroit today. She's just as new to the VA profession as I am. She told me about her first day as a VA and a client that was in her own words "hastily signed." The client was a busy executive type who needed to get a letter drafted and emailed out to some of his colleagues in his field.

My friend didn't probe this gentleman's needs in depth and failed to fully understand the scope of work that she was to perform. She admitted that she made a mistake as we all do on occasion. She was under the impression that after getting the letter approved, the client has all of the contacts and email addresses in Outlook or in a .csv file. Unfortunately that was not the case.

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virtualguy

I first started working in the administrative field when I was 20 years old. My first admin job was working as a secretary at the county juvenile probation department. My was that an awkward feeling. Awkward because I was the only male in a secretarial pool of seven people and the rest were females. Imagine all of the strange looks from the juvenile probation officers that passed through the admin section and visitors who came into the lobby while I provided receptionist relief.

The Chief Juvenile Probation Officer and the Juvenile Court Judge thought that I was from the Information Systems Department. I asked myself, "What have I gotten myself into?" I just knew that I had chosen the wrong field to get into. As time...

virtualguy