I have a fake personal assistant. It started almost by accident, but for 10 years has made people take me more seriously.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jamira Burley, a 34-year-old who works in the tech industry. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.For the last 10 years, I've had a fake assistant. His name is Matt, and he answers emails for me. He negotiates rates, schedules meetings, and rejects offers that aren't up to par. It happened almost by accident.
And when an opportunity didn't work out, it was easier to have Matt say no to something than to do it myself.I had figured out how to make people take me more professionally, but it was by using a fictitious white man as a go-between. Luckily, someone only asked to speak to Matt on the phone once. I asked one of my brothers to get on the phone and pretend to be Matt, which he did. I think people don't usually ask to actually speak to him because I have a deck of all my offerings that Matt would send out so all their questions are already answered.The real Matt is a close friend who doesn't know that he's the inspiration for my fake assistant.
I wanted to emulate it, so I did. He doesn't know that I've been using him as inspiration for my fake assistant's persona for more than a decade, and he won't know until he reads this. But I think he'll think it's funny.and liked more than 81,000 times.
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