Purely for my own amusement, and hopefully for yours, I have decided to have an occasional series here in HorroR Stories about how when you work in HR long enough it starts to affect how you view everything in life. Keep sending questions though! I will resume the usual Q&A next time. Now that the NFL season is in full swing, my husband has pretty much tuned all the televisions in the house to ESPN and thrown away the remotes. I can’t help but get drawn in by all the story lines surrounding football. Also, because I’m in HR, hearing all these story lines makes me think about HR and the lessons companies and mangers can learn from the NFL. Here are some of the lessons I think we can learn from the NFL regarding the workforce today: No one should ever think they are indispensable, until they are indispensable The referee strike has revealed all sorts of harsh realities of the modern workforce. I’m going to give you some thoughts without talking about unions. I don’t fuck with unions. Here are my few non-union thoughts: Turnover is costly. Replacing a good employee costs more than the ad you posted on Monster.com. When you lose a good employee, or even worse a good employee with a lot of experience, the lag time in having the position open and then getting the new person up to speed is costly. And, worse, you may have to replace that star worker with someone who’s been working in the lingerie league because all the other good refs have jobs in the NCAA. Companies tend to shine the spotlight on their revenue generators: their sales reps and business development types at the expense of the A/P clerks and admin...

Everything I need to know about Economics I learned flying First Class last week. #1: There was one bathroom at the front of the plane for the exclusive use of the 8 First Class passengers sitting in Rows A & B. #2: There were two bathrooms at the rear of the plane to be shared by the remaining 141 passengers in Rows C – Z. #3: From my vantage point in seat A1, this was just fine. From this experience I learned two vital lessons: #1: Economic inequality is all around us in today’s America #2: It’s only a problem if you’re poor Usually, I’m a proud member of the disgruntled poor. Hell, I work in the theatre — we put the “non” in “non-profit”. In my field, the 1% refers to people earning a living wage or the award-winning playwrights that own dishwashers (Albee sold his for gin). After all, if you work in a building named for a rich person you’re a broke motherfucker yourself. So, on a plane, you’d expect to find me jammed in a middle seat in Broke Motherfucker Class (not even Broke Motherfucker Plus) reading a torn Sky Mall Magazine and dreaming of the massage chairs and air purifiers that I’ll never own, and knowing that while the half-bottle of water and micro-bag of pretzels I was allotted by Cheapskate Air isn’t quite enough sustenance to “keep me alive,” it is exactly enough to make me go to the bathroom, which means I’ll have to shake loose the blood clot forming in my leg, machete my way out of my row, and slog to the back of the plane so I can wait with all the other Broke Motherfuckers for my 30 seconds of solitude pooping into the fluorescent...