Well that's just what a manager should be doing. Their job is to ensure everyone else can work. Quite literally a "production assistant". They should deal with all the BS that workers don't want to, so they can get to the real work. Which is the main flaw in promoting workers to management, as they're two entirely different sets of skills.

There's a post on joelonsoftware about this, and I think it constitutes most of the first few chapters of the book peopleware.