Lately we've seen a lot of anti-social behavior publicized in the news, problems so ridiculously obvious that the people in HR once again failed to properly address employees behaving in highly atypical and aberrant ways, in full view of people with cameras and many other trusted employees. Not that I've ever trusted or relied on some HR wonk to screen anyone for me, let alone choose which pencil I might use at my desk. First, they make jack shit as pay (because it's essentially a useless job), and second, they typically favor the mentally ill employee in any given situation, because (and here's the fun part), a lot of Human Resource workers have generic "Psych" degrees from nameless schools, places where they yearned to understand their own broken brain, and now yours on the job. They can't get a job with their degree upon graduation, and now neither can you, in petty retaliation for their many problems.
It was so bad at the end of my corporate career, that I pre-screened every possible job lead I had by asking a series of industry-related questions over the phone first, before I wasted my time commuting to some wacky interview at my own expense. If I got weirdly paranoid stonewalling from a 20-nothing kook who is power-tripping over my possible career future on the other end of the line, (because as a female business leader, I can't have that in the workflow) I simply didn't waste my time pursuing it further. Why would I?
I don't need anyone to ask me questions. I ask them, and then I teach YOU what to do about it the next time it happens. That's why my salary is much higher than yours, and you hate that, too. Plus, I have this rock star portfolio of infamous and well-known book cover designs that you need an Ivy degree and tons of real world experience to interpret correctly. Why would I waste my time with someone who has absolutely no experience in publishing? It would be like my mom (back in the day) submitting to some lame (and very easy for her) Pipette exam timed by a pencil-neck geek with a bad attitude who failed out of some joke two-year community college.
What's the point? Would you try to teach a donkey rocket science? Well, would you? I'm waiting for your answer to my bullshit clipboard series of odd questions that I hide from you (like a very fucked up and purely verbal Rorschach test), while impatiently tapping my fingers on a table to give you the uncomfortable feeling that is ME, the know-nothing HR girl, who is the big-time designer and not you. Huh. That's odd. Isn't it?
After I get through them as the main obstacle to me potentially doing business with a company in the future, it's the key people I see every day. I never use an HR wonk, or hire talent through them, or use them to screen freelancer portfolios, or type email's to one of them, or talk to an HR employee on the phone, or even speak with one of them at the company Christmas party, because they are nothing to us. I make books. You don't. Therefore, you are not actually part of my real world work. You are a business expense that we (as a company) do not need, because you are useless. That's why you give "Creatives" so much attitude: the clock is ticking on your boring office job, which is funded by this girl right here. That's right: you are being phased out of this business, and not me. End of discussion.
It's sort of the office equivalent of me pretending that you sitting there next to a blow-up sex doll during lunchtime in the company's cafeteria is the same thing as my hot relationship with this gorgeous, interesting, and very educated man in the real world: you see us in the hallway or elevator, stare at us like we're sideshow freaks, then spend your time sitting in your office on the company's IM network, gossiping about how cool/smart/fun/pretty we are, but right after you ignore that 10th email I sent you sitting in your Inbox, the same one that your supervisor, the department head, and the VP of Design/Production received from me about that guy from Production Editorial who twitches in his cubicle all day long (on a good day) violently cursing to himself, or the editor who openly lives out of his office space and eats off of a hot plate that sits right next to a pile of papers (which the sick Art Director ignores, because she's on Valium for her clinical depression) because he hoards so badly, he can no longer live in his apartment.
Yeah. It's kinda like that. It's kind of like me noting that you are a violently anti-social, highly medicated, viciously paranoid psychopath (in full view of a bunch of low-paid, drugged out zombies who are used to doing excruciatingly dull, compulsively repetitive tasks like robot drones by the company higher ups, the Board of Director, and the ever-important shareholders), every single day of my life, telling anyone who will listen in a thousand different ways, and who do nothing at all about it but ignore it, hoping the problem goes away. You did nothing. You did absolutely nothing about it.
