At which point a bunch of pictures the night shift had been printing while the big bosses were home sleeping came pouring out.  I was unfortunately called in to investigate.

People are weird, and the things that excite people are weird, and the porn people print out when they think nobody else will ever see it is deeply weird.

When you look at other people’s email, it’s even worse.  I’ve written at least a thousand lines of code over my career to let non-technical HR people trawl the email anomalies instead of the postmaster, because, y’know,  there are things you just can’t unsee.  Hell, there are people I can’t even look at anymore without getting the fantods, and I’m reasonably open-minded for an old fart.

Example: in mandatory HR training, had a woman ask the class if we knew what “dependancies” were.  Turns out we were all wrong, we didn’t — because the only answer she would except was the weird and entirely arbitrary HR-definition. 

And then we spent 20 minutes role-playing it.

And you wonder why centers are outsourced…

Suffice to say, he gave a reference, all right.

In the 90′s they had to make job offers the same day, and people who complained and spread rumors were likely to get the boot. 

Today the people who spread rumors are in the drivers seat, and as managers push to reduce headcount no accusation is too small or absurd to ignore.

It takes a healthier person to sublimate their pain into humor. Mostly people turn in raving “dry drunks” who go through life lecturing other people, or more often, making stuff up about other people and accusing them. 

After all, what can you really say about people who find it funny to collect the applications of people who, in this day and age, are trying their best to play along with a rigged game full of bullshit and duplicity. As someone who can’t even bear to look through want ads because of the unbelievable feeling of dissociation it causes, I have to give a lot of credit to people who can continue to send in resumes and cover letters that “make you stand out” to a bunch of nameless and faceless assholes who are just going to laugh at you and then hire whatever idiot applies that went to the same college that the HR rep did, or the hiring manager’s frat buddy, or the CEO’s useless, drooling, simpering idiot of a son or daughter.

Further, it seems like the author is completely unaware that – while talking about the unbearable horribleness of corporate bureaucracy – she is in fact an integral, and perhaps the most crushingly cruel, cog in that same bureaucracy.  It’s that same sort of self-blindness that she gets her perverse jollies from when it sends her applications for work.

If I sound bitter, it’s because I am – and I won’t lie about it. I’ve long since given up the hopes gaining meaningful employment doing the sort of inane and dehumanizing bullshit that passes for work these days and, more importantly, in demeaning yourself  to find a job in the first place.

Then one day two of his employees got in a verbal catfight.  This was disrupting the whole team’s work, so he took them into a closed conference room.  As it turned out, what they were fighting over was him, so he settled back to enjoy the prospect of two attractive women battling for the favors of a somewhat dumpy middle aged guy.

At which point one of them whipped off her shoe and drove the high heel a half-inch into the other woman’s forehead.  Bedlam ensued, an ambulance and police were called, and suddenly the night supervisor’s long history of inappropriate behavior was common knowledge.

The next day his wife heard the story somehow, while he was at work being reprimanded.  None of us knew he had a 6-foot-plus Jamaican wife with muscles like a professional bodybuilder and a temper like an active volcano.  She wasn’t willing to wait for him to come home for a confrontation, and when she showed up in the front office she went through every person in her path like a bowling ball through ninepins.  There were quite literally people flying through the air, and I heard her voice from the floor above.

The HR guy says he heard her coming too, and before she yanked the door open and started beating his ass the errant husband was begging frantically for a place to hide… it took about six people to pull her off, and she was still struggling when the police took her away in cuffs.

“Yes, we did hire Dolores.   We sincerely regret it, and wish we could have the money we spent training her back again.”

Mind you, I’m not supporting the position. I’m just explaining what actually happens.

HR have their own printers to print porn… yeah…. okay. Not for example to print letters etc. which are confidential. It’s the porn.

Does this person work in a real business?

THIS.  A million times this.

Whatever I said, they hired me anyways, and I quickly learned never to talk to HR ever again.

Nobody in HR had ever actually worked in health care or had the faintest idea what would make for a good applicant, but they screened them anyway.

Yeah I have similar issues in engineering. The only time it worked well was when we hired interns. HR had no role in this to the team leaders just circulated resumes. I picked the first guy who couldn’t compose a document to save his life. Fantastic software guy. I never regretted hiring him.