Is this an appropriate interview question?

No. It's not.

Maybe you could dream up some VERY rare and specialized circumstances - (Hollywood? The boss owns the company? The boss is housebound?).

It's just not.

And your wife should think of this as the first of a series of very awkward assignments.

-Hugh

My wife and I had a good laugh at that interview question because she was an admin asst / editor for a very small organization. The owner asked her to come help her move out of her apartment, to which my wife hesitantly agreed. She was just out of school, trying to make the best impression, etc. Simply not a good situation, and yes, the first of quite a few oddly 1/2 business 1/2 personal assignments.

More practically, I've never seen a home office that counts as a remote site for a company. I'm not saying they don't exist, but this does sound, like Hugh said, the first of many awkward assignments.

I agree. That is a strange question.

-Davis

BLUF: I think that it is an appropriate interview question if it is something the admin might be asked to do.  The question behind it is whether it is something appropriate for the admin to do.  My answer is "It depends".

Listen to the "Effective Executive/Efficient Admin" casts.  Mark and Mike explicitly address the question of whether an admin should run personal errands for the executive.  The result, as I recall, was "Within reason, yes", the examples they cited were picking up dry cleaning is reasonable but buying a present for the executive's spouse not .  They did specify however that the assistant would have to be OK with running personal errands.  It's a question of effectiveness, does the admin doing this make the executive more effective.

Should the admin organise the home office?  It depends.  Will the executive be working from the home office for the company that employs the executive and the admin?  Is that the primary purpose of the home office?  Does the company supply or support the equipment in the home office, or contribute financially or materially to it (e.g. pay for a second phone line, pay for a broadband link or pay for business calls made from the house phone line)?  If so then it is probably reasonable for the admin to organise that office as they would the executives main office at the company. 

If you follow the advice in the "Effective Executive/Efficient Admin" cast then there's actually very little in the executive's office.  Applying that to the home office as well there should be very little organisation needed, after the initial clear out.  The admin's organisation of the home office may be little more than preparing 'Dispatch Boxes' for the executive to take home, probably just the 'Read', 'Hot' and 'Sign' files in a document wallet that they press into the executive's hand as they leave.

Stephen

I agree with Stephen.

A practical example is an international organization where people come to work (away from their home country and culture) for a number of years. The "personal assistant" of such people know the country and the customs, and can organize a lot around the personal life of their boss: get their razor repaired, sell a car, hire a real-estate agent, get internet/telephone, negotiate electricity contracts, etc....

I don't have to dream it up at all, and it's not that exceptionally rare.  So, it's certainly reasonable.

And I know companies and execs who have asked it, and I know many admins who do go to the execs house for all kinds of things.

That said, it does concern me for an admin who would be shared between two execs.  At the level where this sort of support is considered reasonable, those execs don't share.  This level of support would generally be reserved for senior execs.

Mark