I’m a millionaire’s assistant on £85,000 – the weirdest things I’ve been asked to do

Donald Trump’s executive assistant (EA), Natalie Harp, has entered the spotlight following reports that she joined him when he swapped planes to avoid an assassination plot, and speculation over their relationship. Harp travels with the President on all domestic and international trips, and is often seen carrying a portable printer to provide Trump with hard copies of articles and social media posts. Executive assistants can be some of the most powerful people in a company – as the gatekeepers of directors’ diaries and personal lives. But they’re also the most put upon. Here, an EA working at a prestigious financial services firm in London reveals what it’s like to be an aide to some of the UK’s wealthiest people. Shorts A guy I worked for once rang me from a hotel in Amsterdam and said: “Could you ring the front desk and tell them that my bags are ready to collect from my room?” He would never understand that the call to me could have just gone to the front desk, because he’s so used to an EA doing everything. Some of my clients will never pause to think: “Could I do this? Is it actually more efficient?” Someone rang me from Heathrow because they’d left their laptop on the plane. They asked: “Can you talk to British Airways (BA) to get the laptop back for me?” My immediate thought was: “I can, but you’re in the airport, and the plane is probably still on the ground. So I would go straight to the BA desk and ask them.” Of course I didn’t, though. There are certain things you just do. I’ve been told I absolutely should not be assisting them with non-work-related things, but all the big bosses ask me to do personal stuff all the time. One has three young children and we book all his family’s holidays. He and his wife don’t want to pay for all the children and the nanny to be in first class. But the airline’s rules are that children under two cannot travel without an adult next to them. We have this constant back and forth with BA, and the universal truth of people who earn half a million a year is that they don’t see why stuff can’t happen. They won’t accept an airline’s policy; rather, they will see it as a problem for you to solve. The younger people who work in financial services are a unique breed. They have had their eye on the prize since they were 16 – an internship at BarCap or JP Morgan and then LSE or Harvard. Very few seem to take gap years or travel, so the day they graduate, they have someone working for them at a big institution. They’re super driven, single-minded and are always fighting for space and a promotion. They also work insane hours – I can tell from their expenses. None of them leave their desks for lunch; they all have dinner in the office and they get cabs home. An average day ends at 10.30-11pm, and when a deal is on, it’ll be 2.30-3.30am. They’re often in on the weekends, too, so they completely lack a social life. These are not smart kids from poor backgrounds who did well. They all come from wealthy, staffed-up families, were maths geeks at school and have little charm or social understanding. They are so juvenile, they will need advice on things like presents to buy or restaurants to go to. Everyone is always icily polite, though. They never forget to say please and thank you. They are also the most frugal people I’ve ever met, spending all their money to rent flats within 15 minutes of the office, and the rest on investments so they can retire early. But if they want me to buy anything, it’s always whatever is cheapest on Amazon. They won’t even get coffee outside the office, and when they do, they expense it as “mentoring”. They have nothing to do or talk about but work. They’re all single or just having office relationships. Of course, I’ve had ridiculous requests and situations as an EA. One time, a boss kicked off because salted caramel popcorn was not served in the meeting rooms on his floor. Another time, a higher-up was flying from New York to Europe; they wanted a vitamin-infused IV drip waiting in the hotel for her. There is one guy from another level of privilege – his family are billionaires. He was on a fundraising roadshow in Milan and wanted his own hire car. Halfway through the day, he got annoyed with said car, so abandoned it. He just left it in a side street in Milan, with the keys in, and flew back to New York. When he got home, he said to his EA: “You’re going to need to get that car back to the depot”. He didn’t know where he’d left it; he couldn’t even give a street name. From New York, she had to track this car, then get it back to the airport. On a daily basis, he would say to her, “I’ve been charged for all these extra days. Hurry up!” What’s so depressing is that she solved it. Even if you get taken advantage of, when you rise to the occasion, they then go: “See, it wasn’t a problem; you did it!” It makes it hard to draw the line. My job isn’t the dream, but it pays (and I have kids). I’m on £85,000. The business clearly has enough to pay me more, given they fly people around in business class, but if I asked for a pay rise, they would almost certainly say no. That said, at Christmas we are all given personal presents and they’re very generous – sometimes it’s over £500 cash. I now have intimate knowledge of my bosses’ preferences and lives. I have a four-way split brain – I have the juggle of my professional life, my professionals’ life, their personal lives and then my personal life. I do sometimes feel like I’m drowning in requests and people demanding things of me. But I’ve been doing this for over a decade and there have been some shifts. Before, they would email at 10.30pm expecting an immediate response; now, they might CC you overnight but will not expect you to action it until the morning. Years ago, none of the men would have done nursery drop-off or gone to the kids’ nativity. But now, lots of them will be like, “Don’t schedule anything for me before 9.30am because I always do drop-off in the morning with my kids”. My work-life balance has thus improved too. I can go to my kids’ sports days. Compliance is big now. They’re meant to provide us with receipts for every single thing they buy on the company card, though several people I’ve worked for don’t bother. Anytime our analysts get invited to anything or take someone out where the cost is more than £250, we have to get legal approval and go through a whole procedure to show they’re not hanging out with a politically exposed person and won’t have their business decision swayed by it. But all they have to do is say “yep, I don’t!” and that’s it. I asked ChatGPT how long it thought my job would be around for, and it said two years. I think it’s more like five – a lot of what we do is having to make split-second decisions. For now, AI can’t replicate that.