Miscellaneous desk
< January 17	<< Dec \| January \| Feb >>	January 19 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

January 18[edit]

Staff name[edit]

What do you call the person who buys ordinary stuff for the office, e.g., tea, coffee, pen, pencil, and so on. I was thinking of the word runner... Also, could you give me something to read where it specifies an organization's staff (titles) hierarchy or so.

123.108.244.156 (talk) 17:07, 18 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It's going to depend on the company. In my company it's called the purchasing department. You could check Purchasing management, Procurement and Accounts payable. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:21, 18 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

For a lot of small or medium sized companies, that task is performed by the office manager or equivalent. Incidental items for office use is part of a companies indirect spend budget. uhhlive (talk) 19:46, 18 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You could call them an admin assistant or procurement assistant. --Viennese Waltz 20:45, 18 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

For your second question, it's going to change from one company to the next. And just seeing a title doesn't mean that you're going to know what they actually do or how they would fit into an organization's hierarchy. For instance, Customer Support Engineer Analyst. Does that mean that with 'engineer' in the title that they actually build anything? Not in this case. So, do they analyse what the engineers build? Nope again. Would this position be above, below, or at the same level in the hierarchy as a Customer Support Engineer? Again, you can't answer that because the title is too vague to know from an outsider's perspective. †dismas†|^(talk) 21:00, 18 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Factotum 196.213.35.146 (talk) 06:47, 19 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Dogsbody. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 07:33, 19 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

In London, the dogsbody was officially called the "office messenger" and was often a retired soldier. Alansplodge (talk) 10:59, 19 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Did he pay for it out of his own pocket? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:13, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tea, coffee, milk, sugar, pens and pencils are commonly paid for out of petty cash. Akld guy (talk) 19:07, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Not necessarily. In a larger company, office supplies may be bought in bulk by the purchasing department, and food and drink supplying may be outsourced. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:25, 22 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Gofer? Bus stop (talk) 19:45, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]