I Am Not a Resource. Trust Me.

I had to break into the conference room on this one. They didn’t invite me because they’re trying to keep me in the good favor with the human resources department. The last art director was a real pain in their asses, from what I’ve been told, in only and so many words. “Don’t be like Kathryn,” my boss told me. “She was a real pain in the ass with the human resources department.”

But I don’t know how I can manage that. I’ve always been the bane of the human resources managers, and they’ve always been a can of liars to me. Human resources managers are trained in occupational courses at bad colleges to do what they do: practiced fleecing and wool-pulling in measured amounts. Anyone without a soul can do it, but what really sets human resources managers apart is their efforts in correspondence course empathy and patience. They have to do that in order to hold off opportunistic and aggressive employees bent on calling their lawyers.

They’ve never done any other job in any other department of any corporation they’ve been in. They’re trained specifically for this role, and they get in on it young. Getting in on it young is the first problem. No one they ever have to deal with got in on it young. We worked for our careers. We bussed tables or sold computers or drove trucks or picked up other people’s garbage while we were fine tuning the complete crap on our resume into something worth printing and handing to a run-down temporary agency in a temporary office in some decrepit office plaza next to the closed dollar store and the movie theater where people get shot or laid. We got our first jobs and busted our asses and kissed those of others and tried to make it seem like working from 7:30 to 7 every day for 8 bucks an hour is the best thing that ever happened to us, just so we could learn to suck up to the next human resources tool, usually younger than us, sitting there all prim and proper with hands folded and desk organized, listening to us beg to be hired by their corporation, which pays 50 cents more on the hour and might this time have a department manager whose lifelong dream might not appear this time to be to break me into little pieces for the cleaning crew to remove in the middle of the night, quiet and easy.

Human resources managers are inherently evil and destructive, and they enjoy it. They appear naïve and formal, but they know all your tricks before you think of them and have crib notes pinned to the insides of their eyelids. They are highly trained soul assassins. Their department title is, or would be, to any rational person, a perfect oxymoron, but anyone approaching a conversation or confrontation with a human resources manager thinking too much about the human part and not enough about the resources part is begging to be flattened, spit on and laughed at later over drinks at the mahogony bar.

I burst in the door and got a glare from my boss. I put my finger to my mouth to indicate that she should shut the fuck up about it, and to imply that so will I. I sat down. They were discussing one of my employees, and I’m not a blood-sucking thief. I have this inappropriate urge, whenever I’m managing people, to look out for them as best I can.

That’s not to say I don’t understand the role of a manager, which was explained to me by my father years ago, which is to represent the needs and wishes of the company to his staff, and to get as much productivity out of them, in as kind and reasonable a fashion as possible, given the corporate strictures passed down to me from my superiors. Such is the task of the middle manager.

This one I had met once before. Her name was Debbie. I was attending a big divisional meeting at corporate headquarters in New Jersey. The meeting was MC’ed by the division VP. It took about an hour for him to go over new hires and to go over sales numbers from the previous year. How we did and how we’re going to do. The company was on top of the market share. It was doing very well. Everyone clapped. Even I clapped, even though one of the reasons that the VP cited for 2004’s success was “holding off on new hires,” which didn’t mean not filling positions, but instead, as they did with me, it meant keeping me employed by a temporary agency while I personally managed an entire site, 3 managers and 30 employees. I still clapped. I was hogtied. They had all the money and I had all the hunger.

Debbie approached me after the meeting to introduce herself. She knew who I was because I had to stand when they announced my name as a new hire (even though I still wasn’t, nor would I be for another month and a half). She introduced herself with a huge smile. She didn’t have much to say after the introduction. She just sort of stood there as if her telling me who she was was enough for me to commence in an ass-kissing speech. She was very small and a very cute little thing. I could have thrown her across the room. Probably could have sent her all the way to the podium, with a huge microphone boom. But that’s not how to do away with human resources managers. You have to stamp them out in a dark corner like they want to do to you.

But now listening to her on the other end of the 10-year-old speaker phone, I realized I was wrong. I should have killed her when I had the chance. Someone needed to, still does. She certainly seems the perfect option for a date rape assault – cute and stupid, and she’d definitely not keep her mouth shut long enough during the thing to keep the villain from slitting her throat just to keep her quiet. It was a long shot, but I had to hang my hat on something. She was dismantling my spirit.

But in the meantime I had to listen to her try to destroy my staff. Her use of doublespeak made it very hard for me to keep quiet. I couldn’t follow a damn thing that she was saying, but everyone else kept saying, “yeah, yes,” “no, yeah, I understand.” It was like having someone explain that they’re going to have to pull your tonsils out through your asshole. I wanted to stop her on every word. Every word was wrong. She was going to pull our tonsils out through our assholes and she was going to use a steam shovel to do it. But they were all buying it. Either they werent paying attention or they were all stupid or, what I really think is that they were all scared. Human resources affects everyone, not just staff. This 24-year-old little bitch holds not only the fate of my staff in her hands, but also mine and that of every manager all the way up the line. The reason my boss doesn’t want me to piss them off is because she wants to keep me around. That’s because I’m making her life easier, and she fears that situation changing. But the reason she won’t argue herself is because she fears for her job. We don’t consult human resources in order to make our jobs easier, we consult them to keep our fear in check long enough to not piss them off by making our own decisions.

I tried to say something before the call ended, but my boss made it as clear as she could with the look in her eyes that my job was on the line. I had to keep quiet and stay in the background for as long as possible. Debbie had just handed down judgment on someone. It was an evil task to pass that message along. Even Debbie knew it was evil. She wouldn’t even give us the message in writing. That was no mistake. Human resources managers will break the rules in order to survive, just like everyone else. They’re like cops running red lights or showing their badge during a bar fight to avoid having their own justice served. You cant respect people like that, even though you have to.

- posted by seanmh @ 10:26 AM