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...

BOOM! There it is! Another flash of lighting and a crack of thunder. Nothing says summer quite like a big old thunderstorm, and while the lightning can be amazing to watch, it can also be quite dangerous. Some spectacular shots have been caught on camera and these videos, are, well, shocking! Say, let’s get out our camcorder and take some video of this thunderstorm – until lightning strikes that tree 20’ foot away! Love the slow-mo and the stills! That tree is totally lit up! In this next video from Australia, a crew of photographers is shooting an approaching storm when a large bolt strikes about 250 meters away. Check out how the dirt flies during the slow motion close-up! The Empire State Building was built to withstand lightning strikes as most skyscrapers are. Without the lightning rod on the top, the electric current would seriously damage the building, but being one of the tallest in New York City – it gets struck all the time. . In this shocking video from South Africa, lightning strikes during a live soccer (or football) game broadcast on TV.  Many of the players go down, some requiring CPR, and several being carried off the field in a stretcher. Next to Japan, where the local news has video of an elderly pedestrian getting struck by lightning in a crosswalk! Forward about 18 seconds in. Amazingly, the man is only dazed and walks off. In Texas, where severe lighting and storms knock out the power to a neighborhood. A local resident is recording video of the mass amounts of lighting strikes when one nails his neighbor’s house across the street. Fast forward to 1:05 to see the hit. Caution: the language is rather colorful. Here’s super-cool video of a passenger airplane taking off in San Francisco...