HR has Made Me a Nerd: Watching the NFL and How Managers Suck [HorroR Stories]...

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...

Corrie-lynn Dyson Hails the Ultimate Resignation [Fierce Anticipation]

The Man This week I’m going to talk about the viral YouTube video, “Joey Quits”. If you aren’t one of the 2,763,107 who’ve viewed the video, I’ll give you an overview (then you can check it out below). The video starts with a close up of Joey (I never noticed it before, but he does look a little like James Franco) explaining that he’s spent three and a half years working at a hotel where he and his fellow employees are treated like sh*t and he’s quitting with the help of his band mates. The group in the video is fraction of the What Cheer? Brigade, a nineteen piece punk marching band from Providence, RI. When Joey’s boss arrives on the scene, he immediately tells them all to leave. Joey hands over his two week notice which his boss refuses to take so Joey lets it drop to the floor and throws his hands in the air as he leaves. His band mates stay where they are and break into a rousing rendition of “Bubamara”. After the cymbal player (to learn more about how hot she is, read any of the comments on YouTube!) changes the incident board to 0 days without incident or time lost, the band marches out of the building yelling, “Joey quits, Joey quits!” The Myth First of all, I was not at all surprised “Joey Quits” went viral. Why wouldn’t it? Joey acts out the ultimate Johnny Paycheck “take this job and shove it” fantasy. Anyone who watches his resignation float to the ground and thinks “Bad move, buddy, you’ll never get a reference now”, that person needs to clap their hands and believe in fairies! No one should be that jaded. It’s a beautiful moment. Right now, people...

Stand and Occupy LA [Nerd in Transition] Oct06

Stand and Occupy LA [Nerd in Transition]

It’s 10am and I’m standing in the glare of California’s unforgiving sun. My delicate epidermis glistens as it cooks to a cancerous brown. The lamp post supporting my back displays a Metro sign informing would be riders that the 78, 79 & 378 buses all stop here. There is no bench. There is no shade. There is only the sun, the pole and the wait. At 10 a.m., I am already late for my first political protest. I’ve spent years shaking my head at the government. In coffee shop conversations I have fought for the masses. Online, I spread news articles and amusingly honest memes. Yet never have I gathered to shake the peoples fist. As our Rome falls, and the rubble lands on the backs of the populace, I felt it was time to stand up and yell. I want to yell at the 1% riding off into a future of greater economic prosperity and the banks that continue pushing them forward. I want to scream in the face of my “for the people by the people” government that refuses to end Bush-era tax cuts and take greater measures to help level the playing field. I am desperate to bring back the middle class, because at only 33, I don’t like the prospect of a life toiling from paycheck to paycheck. So I stand waiting for a bus to transport me from my low income neighborhood of Lincoln Heights to Los Angeles modest downtown where myself and an unknown number will gather for the beginning of Occupy L.A.. Unless you only get news from major media outlets you have probably heard of Occupy Wall Street, the protest that began in New York three weeks ago with a few hundred angry students that has...