The new Netflix hit depicts a woman’s life as an assistant to a billionaire who even gets her to write her sexts for her. It’s surprisingly accurate…

Milly Alcock and Julianne Moore in Sirens
NETFLIX

NO FRUIT IN SALADS, NO FRUIT SALADS” — so began the eight-page-long dietary restriction document that I opened on my first day. A welcome to a world in which a passing comment on a watermelon is noted, documented and later enshrined in an assistant “bible” by your predecessor.

This ensures nothing is less than perfect in your boss’s life. It has not only the “dietaries” of your boss and each family member (including their two-year-old son and his preferred brand of almond milk), but also lists specific protocols for how to have parcels discreetly delivered (it shall pass from assistant to driver to housekeeper before it arrives unwrapped with its intended recipient) and details the movements that you must be kept abreast of (the security team will email you every time a family member moves, from the four-year-old being driven to ballet in an armoured car to the “wheels up” of the private plane on its way to the Hamptons for the summer).

No matter how hard you study the bible, you cannot ever prepare fully for the demands of jobs such as these. Because the truth is the endless entitlement that this particular level of wealth breeds cannot be predicted by those who have grown up outside it.

It’s a world depicted by the new Netflix show Sirens, which portrays one woman’s intertwined relationship with her demanding billionaire boss. And when it comes to what the wealthy can require of their personal employees, it’s brilliantly accurate.

It’s a job in which the goalposts constantly move; you might feel that it is excessive to spend £22,000 after 22 minutes of taking photos of amethyst geodes in a Notting Hill crystal shop one day, but that’s only until the next week, when there’s a birthday and at a jeweller in Mayfair you realise the diamond necklace you have been sent to buy costs £180,000.

Aside from the fiscal excess, there’s the personal overreach. No corner of your boss’s world is too private for you to be involved in. Valentine’s Day meant heading to Selfridges to buy a card for my boss to give to his wife. Just as I was choosing one, I got a call from my boss’s wife’s assistant. Could I also buy a card for her to give to him? I found myself agonising over cards for people I knew slept in separate wings to each other. And don’t even get me started on the harpist.

When people are fully staffed they surrender an amazing amount of control over their everyday existence. Nothing is ever perfect enough — not the private room at the restaurant they enjoyed last weekend, or the 80-person pizza party you threw for their child’s last birthday. The job is really to be ahead of the curve in the pursuit of whatever your boss doesn’t currently have — something more, something different — but just always make sure what’s next is something even better.

There’s a massive gift in being so closely entwined with people who live at such a level, and it’s not the awful Rolex you got one Christmas — it’s the knowledge that there’s nothing really to envy at the centre of it all.

She told me she’d left her coat at a business lunch — but didn’t know which one

“Do not take this job” is what some people said when I was offered a role as the PA to a notable media figure. I ignored the naysayers. Each morning I’d go into my boss’s office before she arrived to delete the spam emails from her inbox, then I’d open the post and go back in for a meeting.

When it came to letters, she insisted on dictating them into a tape for me to type into an email before sending it to her to make corrections. Then she’d send it back to me to send to the recipient.

On one early occasion she directed me to pick up sushi for her from Pret. I left it on her desk and returned to mine, where I was sitting while she yelled through from her room: “Oh, but it has avocado and I’m allergic to avocado.” I felt terrible, and humiliated, as my coworkers regarded me with pity.

On another she informed me that she’d left her coat at a business lunch, but wasn’t sure which business lunch. I looked through her calendar and then shlepped to every restaurant she frequented in central London. Later, when I secured her reservation at a five-star hotel that wasn’t her favourite five-star hotel (sold out), she made me feel as if I’d committed a crime.

She’d pull me in with personal intimacies, taking me for three-cocktail lunches (she ordered on my behalf) and asking me to advise her on family issues. Once, she asked me in front of a number of colleagues to promise to organise the catering at her funeral.

“Of course,” I said, and then I thought, should I put that on the calendar?

At these times I’d feel like things were looking up, then a day or a week later she’d turn on me, berating me for minor errors or misunderstandings. Colleagues would email me throughout the day via their personal accounts. Example subject line: “Did she just snap her fingers at you???” Some complained to the office manager, who was helpless. Others attempted advice. “Maybe,” one said, “it would be better if you were a man.”

“I need you to know what I’m thinking before I think it,” is something my boss said to me on one heated occasion. I couldn’t, and so, almost two years into my employment, it all blew up. I could see, as she entered the office that morning, that my boss was not in a good mood. Soon she stormed over to my desk to demand to see a document — a single sheet — that she’d told me to give to someone else the day before.

“Oh,” I said, “it’s on her desk, but I can go get it … ”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she shouted.

I looked at her. I didn’t raise my voice or stand up. I said: “I don’t think it’s fair for you to speak to me that way.”

It was the one and only time I objected. She told me it was time for me to find a new job. That day, strangers on the Tube who saw me sobbing on the way home plied me with tissues from their handbags. It was beautiful. It reminded me that people could be kind.

I had to lie when she didn’t turn up to meetings

When you’re someone’s assistant you’re strangely intertwined in their life — an additional limb fused to their being. You are responsible for their diet, when they eat, where they eat, who they see, who they don’t see, where they go, what they do, and what shade of Farrow & Ball white their kitchen is painted.

My overlord was the head of an accessories department, overseeing a small team who were responsible for identifying trends and managing the flow of shoes, handbags, belts and sunglasses in and out for fashion shoots. It soon became clear that many of these items were actually intended for my boss’s cupboard, not a magazine cover. If she had an event, a dinner or holiday that “required” new accoutrements, she’d skip shopping and just pocket some fashion freebies. It took longer than I’d like to admit to fully grasp that she was regularly stealing thousands of pounds’ worth of accessories.

I’d get angry emails from PR teams asking where their borrowed items were and I’d have to fend them off with promises that the pieces would be returned.

While she perennially lurked like a snake in my emails and texts, her physical presence was haphazard at best. When she did come in it was usually a brief visit before a long lunch. Often I had to make up an elaborate lie if she was unexpectedly called into a meeting. Her concerns rarely involved her job, I was mainly harassed to check in on the status of her “borrowed” accessories or her holiday house renovation.

Being a personal assistant is not a job that I’d recommend to anyone. Having to put someone else’s needs consistently above your own, and pay more attention to them than you would your friends, partner or children, is an unhealthy and imbalanced existence.