There are many good reasons to be pleasant to your secretary, here is another one.

When planning her exit from her firm, this particular secretary set up a rather blunt out-of-office response to let correspondents know that she was no longer at the firm. When a court official emailed her to confirm a date for a hearing, he received the following auto-reply (via ATL):

From: Email No Longer Valid: [xxx’s assistant]
Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 11:56 AM
To: [xxx]
Subject: RE: [xxx]

Effective 11/10/2009, this email is no longer in service.

If you want an update regarding your worker’s compensation claim, contact xxx xxx personally at xxx-xxx-xxxx and if he refuses to speak to you, which he will, then mostly likely he’s avoiding you because he has NOT worked on your case and IS in the office browsing through facebook… Good luck, you’ll need it.

Likely to strike a nerve whether or not the firm has ‘client focused’ spiel in its literature; which in this case…

“Experienced Results Focused Practice With the Attention You Deserve”.

Via ATL