IN MY SHOES: What It’s Like To Be A Personal Assistant
After Natavia Lowery, 26, who was employed as celebrity real estate agent Linda Stein’s personal assistant confessed to bludgeoning her boss to death with a weighted exercise bar – after being relentlessly berated and having marijuana smoke blown in her face, according to her confession to police – the murder put a spotlight on a thankless job that is as close to indentured servitude as one can imagine.
Here, a description of what Gil Parkin, 32 - coincidentally, also the personal assistant to a real estate broker – was required to do to earn his six figure salary:
[D]uties included cooking her lunch and dinner, picking out gifts that went to her clients, and once, doing what amounted to emergency dental work. …
[I]t was the middle of the night. She had ordered him to stay in her apartment and look after her as she recovered from oral surgery. And she wanted him to trim the stitches in her mouth. …
Parkin said the real estate broker "worked from 9 a.m. until about 1 in the morning and expected me to keep the same hours, six or seven days a week." She wanted him to phone in the morning to coordinate what they wore to work, and said she would pay for the plastic surgery, though she never told him why he needed it. …
She demanded the e-mail messages about when he got up, went into the shower and left his home in Astoria, Queens, "so that she could streamline my day and find out how I could be more time-efficient."
Eventually she offered to set up living quarters for him in the studio apartment that served as their office, telling him, "I shouldn't work with somebody who lives in a borough." Parkin now works for a political strategist.
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