You’re getting a lot of negativity but there’s some truth to what you’re saying. It’s nuanced, though.
First: to all the people saying this happens all the time 1) define your terms carefully because there are obvious ethical boundaries here one should not cross, and 2) the power dynamic often means these situations will not be raised even if the admin feels taken advantage of.
So, there’s a range of activities you could be asking someone to do for you. To ground the conversation in reality let’s put some on the board:
Office admin work:
Stocking the fridge, event coordination, arranging regular lunches for meetings/team etc.
EA work:
Managing your calendar, making sure you personally have something to eat during the work day, taking notes in meetings, managing agendas for routine meetings, scheduling business trips etc.
PA work: stocking the fridge, running errands, making reservations for restaurants, trips, etc.
I think the issue here is that many of these tasks are immediately applicable to all three domains. Also, there is a lot of potential overlap between these domains. This means it is very easy to slip from reasonable requests to unreasonable requests without realizing it.
I’ll give a personal example. My life is complicated and my wife’s schedule is just as busy. For a while my wife had to run an every other week all hands at a particular time that meant I needed to deal with some kid duties that she handles the other 9 days of the two week cycle. Except, as everyone knows, you cannot simply assume an inviolate biweekly recurrence. When my wife’s schedule needed to change, mine did too. For policy reasons neither company allowed remote access to calendars, so neither of us had visibility into the other’s potential conflicts.
Enter my EA, who manages my calendar (among other things). At company A it was considered fine for my wife and my EA to communicate directly about schedule changes so that my business day was reflective of my personal commitments. Then company A got acquired and at company B this was not considered okay.
Two sets of rational, well meaning groups came up with fairly different outcomes. Company B got there with a bright line rule that says something like: your EA is only there to facilitate your corporate life, and there should be zero mixing with your personal life. Company A got to a different place because of a belief that, when the personal life is intersecting corporate life, it may be appropriate for your EA to facilitate. This requires judgment whereas the first rule does not, but in general executives are required to have excellent judgment in many situations, so what’s one more?
That said, company B is much larger and I can practically guarantee that they once had a policy like company A and then it was repeatedly abused to the point that they had to change it.
Sorry for the essay, but I think you have an interesting point here that deserves more than the knee jerk responses you’ve gotten so far.