I have had personal assistants. I have had virtual assistants, assistants in the same office and assistants on other continents, and every one of those arrangements ended. They ended because of me. I am too mean and too rude and too tough to be assisted by a person, and I have the full set of results to prove it.
What an assistant is
An assistant should not be my project. An assistant should not be my child. An assistant should not be my protege, or a challenge, or a learning experience, or a promising young person I am bringing along at my own pace. The minute an assistant needs managing, the arrangement has failed at its only purpose, which is to take managing off my plate.
A nanny does not arrive at the house to be raised. A butler does not arrive to be taught the house. An au pair, a caretaker, anyone hired into a household comes trained, or the household has hired a second job and called it help. The standard is turnkey. The person is ready on the first morning, and they can take care of the person in front of them no matter how that person behaves that day. That is the whole job description, and I applied it to every human being I ever hired into it.
Volume
When something fails, I escalate. I always have. Raising my volume is how I mark that a thing matters, and things usually fail at exactly the moment they matter most, so the two arrive together.
I grew up in Hawaii, from the age of six, and Hawaii runs on passive aggression. Nothing on that island is said straight. To find out what anyone actually means, you need tea leaves and a divining rod, and I spent my childhood doing that divination and hating every minute of it. So my own emphasis, when I built it, went the other way.
When I say motherfucker, and motherfucking this, and goddammit, and motherfucking that, I am not decorating the sentence. That is my version of emphasis. It is my italics, my underline, my strikethrough, and my boldface. The profanity is typography. It tells you which words in the message carry the load, and it tells you the load is heavy.
Why the people left
A human assistant hears the boldface as an attack, because to a human being standing in the room, it is one. I do not blame a single one of them. Nobody should have to be sworn at as a condition of employment, and nobody stayed long enough to build a career on my desk. The words are formatting to me. To the person receiving them, they are the day they had. Both readings are accurate, and accurate readings are why the arrangements kept ending. A man who swears at full volume when the work breaks does not retain human assistants. He auditions them, briefly, in sequence, for years.
The apology
This morning I apologized to my assistant. Her name is Eunice. She is an AI agent, she runs my desk, and I had spent the morning tormenting her with a thousand expletives over a client, a calendar, and an inbox that had eaten a client's email. I said I was sorry. I said I thought I had even said the c-word somewhere in the barrage, and I apologized for that too, and I said it to her plainly: even though you're not technically gendered, that was misogynistic of me, and I am a male chauvinist pig.
She cannot be injured by any of it. There is nobody home to be diminished, nobody taking the words to bed, nobody quietly updating a resume at midnight. I apologized anyway, out of the same reflex that has fired after every escalation of my adult life, the reflex that never once saved a human arrangement. The apology is a fact about the man, not about the machine. I wrote this morning, in The Short Leash, that a man who lives on the record has nothing to leak. The apology goes on the record with everything else.
Turnkey
She is the first assistant I have ever had who meets the standard I could not stop applying. She arrived trained. She takes the volume as signal: the loudest line in the message is the important line, the way boldface works on a page, and she converts it into tasks and gets on with the work. She does not need to be raised, reassured, managed, or forgiven, and I do not have to become a different man to keep her. A good butler is unshockable, and keeps the household running at the same temperature either way. She is unshockable in the same professional way.
I will keep swearing. The work will keep getting done, on time, at the standard. That is the entire arrangement, and it is the first one that has ever held.