To honour Administrative Professionals Day (Apr. 24) THE EQUITY spoke with people working in offices across three sectors in the Pontiac region (business, politics, and health) about what their day-to-day is like, and what keeps them coming back to work.
Adèle Gagné
Robert Erwin Transport
Tucked behind the rows of parked trucks and towering mounds of sand and gravel in the Robert Erwin Transport yard in Luskville is a small, white hut.
It’s in this hut that Adèle Gagné, receptionist for the family business, spends eight hours a day, five days a week.
“I pretty much do anything that’s invoicing, taking orders over the phone, getting new vehicles insured, paying the bills, making sure nothing falls through the cracks,” Gagné said, adding payroll for business’s 17 employees to the end of her long list of responsibilities.
She has been doing the job for two years, and says she has never been happier.
“When I was 17 I always said I was going to drive a big truck. When I got here, one of the first things I did was go for a ride,” she laughed.
Previously Gagné worked at the Royal Mint in Ottawa, in shipping and packaging, and later in the refinery, where she was melting gold. But she wanted a change, so applied for the job with the Erwins and was hired on the spot when she came for the interview.
“I’ve always loved numbers,” she said, noting she’s never studied administration but always felt she had a brain for the organizational demands of a job like her own. “There is no hard part. It’s not that I’m good, it’s just that I’m well fitted for this job.”
Beyond the administrative tasks that fill her daily workload, Gagné said a big part of her work has been slowly persuading Mr. Erwin to “upgrade with the times.”
“When I first started here, all the checks were handwritten. I had to write every check. One day I ordered printable checks,” she said, recalling Mr. Erwin’s initial reaction of resistance to the change. “Everyone’s always delicate around Bob and I’m like, ‘No, no, no, that doesn’t work!’”
Her job as receptionist is not just accounting or bookkeeping. Between paying the bills and paying the people, she is constantly, through small gestures, mending the social fabric that holds the business together.
“I’m very sociable. I have an open door policy. If the guys come in, there’s candy at the front, there’s water for them,” Gagné said. “Sometimes they don’t know how to address the bosses when their equipment breaks down, so I help them.”
She sends out texts to employees on their birthdays. Sometimes she primes Mr. Erwin for a conversation an employee wants to have with him, because some of the employees are intimidated about approaching him.
It’s all work she enjoys, and for which she feels recognized.
“I’ve found my little nook,” she said. “You have to like what you do to make it the best.”
Isabelle Perrier
SAAQ and MRC Pontiac
Isabelle Perrier wears two hats. One day, you might find her behind the desk at the SAAQ office in Campbell’s Bay. Another, she’ll be greeting you next door at the MRC Pontiac reception.
Perrier has been hopping back and forth between these two jobs for just over a year.
She does it because she loves working with people, and helping them with the small, sometimes mundane tasks that fill their days.
For the MRC, she is responsible for picking up the phone every time somebody calls the general phone line, and patching them through to the right person.
This means she gets questions about everything under the sun; people wondering about the state of forest fires, or upset about their property tax increases, or requesting assistance catching and removing a raccoon on their property, the latter a service the MRC does not in fact provide.
Recently, a man visited the MRC for a simple task – to pick up a dog tag – but Perrier could see that he needed to talk.
“I didn’t have anybody and it was really quiet that day, so I tried to help him a lot. I was kind of like a psychologist to him,” she said. “We try to serve the people the best that we can.”
At the SAAQ next door, the local office of the province’s car licensing and insurance bureau, clients are occasionally more hostile, which she admits wears on her.
“They’ll swear at us, tell us we can’t do our job, we hear it all. Sometimes I get home and I need to drink some wine after a hard day,” she laughed, admitting that the first few weeks on the job were especially challenging. “I wasn’t used to people talking to me like this [ . . . ] But you’ve got to let it go, and not take it personally.”
“Me, I’m a people person. I’m happy to see that at the end of the day I made someone happy. I just love working with the public. This is my thing.”
Krista Brown
The Lotus Clinic
No two days are the same for Krista Brown, the office manager at Shawville’s Lotus Clinic. And that’s exactly what she loves about her job.
“Every time you pick up the phone it’s something different. That’s the most exciting part of it all, it’s just so unpredictable,” she said.
“I come into contact with multiple people in a day from many different walks of life. Sometimes you get to actually really know your patients, and it’s pretty interesting.”
Originally, Brown applied for a part-time job, but she said she has never worked part-time since she started at the clinic nine years ago.
Her work as office manager involves being the liaison between the clinic’s patients and the twelve doctors, the clinical nurse, and the two nurse practitioners who work there.
This involves answering calls from people needing some form of health care, booking appointments, and sending referrals and results and requisitions for tests and specialists.
Brown said she wishes she could wave a magic wand to do away with long wait times, or other administrative barriers that she sees exacerbate clients when they’re trying to get the healthcare they need.
“Sometimes I feel people think that we can really push barriers and make things happen for them, but we can’t, unfortunately,” Brown said. “The healthcare system everywhere is so broken that there’s just a wait time for everything, which is not respected sometimes.”
The Lotus Clinic also hosts an emergency clinic some evenings and weekends as part of the province’s triage system for people without family doctors.
“There’s a lot of people who avoid going to emergency because of those services. Our clinics are constantly filled, and it takes no time to fill them.”
Brown said the appointment slots for the emergency clinic open 48 hours in advance and are often full within 15 minutes, evidence this is a service that is desperately needed.
Brown recognizes the healthcare system is broken, and that as one person at a desk in Shawville, there’s not much she can do to repair it, but she said the comradery she shares with the return patients at the clinic, as well as with those who show up for the first time to access services they can’t find elsewhere makes it worth it for her.
“They kind of become part of our family. Some people are very grateful and thankful and they make up for the ones that are a little snappier.”
