Learning to ignore
Ignoring people is an important skill to cultivate in this industry (and probably others as well). I certainly don’t ignore a lot of people; just people who make me dumber as a result of interacting with them.
There is one person who is in my group and is the same level as me, but since she’s been at the company longer than me, she seems to think that I’m her admin. She’s called or e-mailed me with requests such as setting up meetings, asking someone something for her, writing an e-mail while she dictates it to me on the phone, and shining her shoes.
These aren’t things that I should be doing, so now I ignore her phone calls (she calls me on average of twice a day), don’t listen to her voicemails and generally ignore her IMs and e-mails. I love it when she IMs me with, “call me when you have a sec”. Of course I don’t call her, but I want to be like - no way bitch, put it in a fuckin e-mail and maybe I’ll respond if it’s not some asinine request!