Ordinary Gweilo

What is the point of an HR department?  Answers on the back of a postage stamp, please.

I think I have been incredibly fortunate in my career (if you can call it that).  Only once have I been employed by a company that actually had an HR department, and as luck would have it they didn’t see the need to have anyone in Asia.  Well, they did hire someone but I am pleased to say that I played a small part in getting her booted out of the company – and as I recall they never replaced her (not in my time, anyway).

Spike is less fortunate:

As some of you know, I do a little bit of writing for one of the local newspapers. We recently were lectured about conflict of interest. Following that lecture, I decided that this writing could be construed as conflict of interest under the very broadest possible definition of that term. So I contacted the proper people and informed them of what I was doing, they took two months to get back to me, after which they issued a legal letter saying that what I’m doing is okay.

A copy of this letter was sent to the Human Resources weasel in the home office who looks after my division and this weasel then gave a copy of it to my boss, telling him essentially that I was a bad person doing a bad thing and that I got caught and that they decided I could keep on doing this bad thing but that I’m a bad person and they need to keep an eye on me.

And when I explained to my boss that I was the one who told the company what I was doing, he was also like, "I don’t know what’s wrong with that guy," and the answer, simply put, is that 90% of people who work in Human Resources are subhuman.

Sadly I think this is true.  I guess there’s a clue in the name of the department.