Lightbulb is no longer here. She no longer writes her 'Retail Diaries." That's a shame. I've worked retail before, in my life, but most of my "professional experience" in the work world could be best characterized as "frontline management."
Over the course of that work experience, I have come to form some rather firm perceptions of a class of workers who call themselves "Human Resource Specialists."
They are mostly not very good perceptions. I hope there are some HR Reps here who can, as Rachel Maddow would say, "talk me down."
I think you guys, and (mostly) gals, can do so. But I suspect you can't. You are dopplegangers. And you know you are. You pretend to be some sort of intermediary between management and labor, but we both know who you work for. You have been trained, it seems, in compassion, and in seeing both sides. But You know and I know, and everyone who has worked for you knows...that you see only one side. You are like the hooker who says she loves it, while it's happening, and is thinking of the next John all the while. You are like the Catholic Priest, who hears a confession from one of his adherents, about bad behavior on the part of the Church, and rushes to the Bishop to allert him that "we have a problem here that needs to be dealt with."
Perhaps I have worked in distinctly unprofessional environments, but chances are you are fucking someone in the organization. I never lucked out, though I've sat across the table from a few good looking HR Reps, and certainly entertained the notion...and I know that their scrupples are are no better nor worse than those of the employees they routinely make decisions about. I've been to regional meetings, where food and booze are plentiful, and seen them in their full flower.
And I learned how to deal with them. Up to a point. Mostly on behalf of the people who I hired...who worked for me. People I depended upon, and people who depended upon me.
HR didn't care about either one of us....not my employees, and not me. They pretended to, but they didn't. Once I realized that, I knew how to work them. Again...up to a point.
I worked for a service industry as a front line manager. It was in the express freight industry. We had a dress code. Of sorts.
It was severely anachronistic. It was sorely out of touch with times. But it was a dress code. It professed to be an attempt to present a professional image to our customers.
In 1995, however, it prohibited long hair amongst it's male employees. You know...shoulder length hair or longer. In 1995, my HR department was still trying to enforce a vision of grooming that dated back to the mid sixties. I used to argue with the HR rep that in the 90's, that vision was so out of touch with most people's perceptions as to be laughable.
I asked my Rep once: "Look...you are driving in your car and come up to a red light. Pedestrians cross the street in front of you. You see a guy in long hair, and you see another guy with a shaved head and a couple of tattoos. Which guy creeps you out the most? The skinhead or the longhair?" (At the time, mind you, the company I worked for had no dress code standards that dealt with shaved heads, or tattoos) She only smiled at me, and didn't answer. Had we been at a restaurant, she would have asked the waiter for another drink.
I asked her, on another occasion, which "generic service person" she thought might most raise eyebrows in an office environment: "The longhaired hippie male, or the buzz cut (lesbian) female (with tattoos on her arms)...our industry was pretty well rife with lesbians, but they were, for obvious reasons, taboo for the HR Department. She couldn't/wouldn't answer that question. Why would a woman sporting a butch haircut be anymore unwholesome than a guy with shoulder length hair, or, for that matter, hair down to the middle of his back?
See...they were dealing with perceptions that were 25 years old, and afraid to deal with perceptions that were au currant. Skinheaded males, and butchy women, were too new for them to wrap their heads around and come up with a corporate response to. So they didn't have a "dress code policy" that dealt with them.
I had an employee who was, I must say in honesty, neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally bad. He was just average. But he was dependable. He never called in sick, and as a front line manager, I appreciated that. He didn't blow out his work in record time, but he wasn't a slow assed laggard, either. And his customers liked him. I never, ever, got a single complaint on the guy. Sometimes you can have a real go-getter who, in his haste, rubs somebody the wrong way.
Anyway, we had a Christmas Party one year, and he was a drummer in a rock band at night, and he shows up just like he is. (At work, he always wore a baseball type cap that was part of the company provided uniform, and under which he pinned his long hair...nobody really knew he had long hair) His hair came down to the middle of his back, and everyone at the party saw it, and HR was notified. I got a call from HR, saying he either had to cut his hair or I had to terminate him.
So...what do I do?
I called him into my office. His name was Angel...he was of Mexican-American descent. I told him the fix that both he and I were in, and I said to him..."Look, I think I can get you out of this, if you trust me here." "Do you trust me?"
He said yeah...
So I told him my plan. I said that I would write a letter on his behalf, but he would have to read it over and agree to it and sign it and claim it was his. I knew how HR worked...they shy away from sacred cows and untouchable minorities. My suggestion was that he explain that his long hair was a cultural symbol...a cultural inheritance from both his Mexican Mother and his Indian Father, and that he wore his hair long because it was a cultural tradition handed down from his father, and it was a tradition he felt a personal obligation and desire to honor.
My advice to my employee was that this letter would make his long hair a non-issue, and that the cultural tradition he professed to having would make him a virtiually "untouchable" employee. I think "a Bald Eagle" was the exact term I used with him. We had this discussion after work, over beers, and I threw it out there as my best advice...he could take it or not...but if he didn't, he'd either have to cut his hair or quit. He took my advice.
I wrote one helluva letter to HR, which Angel signed his name to after reading it and smiling at me. The letter was forwarded on to HR...and wouldn't you know? They decided not to make an issue of his hair, as long as he continued to pin it up under his hat just like he always had done.
Next Christmas, his hair was even longer.
I'd like to tell you he was a model employee. He wasn't. But he wasn't a pain in the ass, either. And he never caused me any problems.
And the HR departments are full of idiots who don't know the first thing about what it takes to get a job done, or what makes a good employee or a bad one. I was a bad employee, but if I could go back in time, I wouldn't have changed anything.