Piss up in a brewery

Okay, further to my recent posts about Human Resources, it’s almost as though they sensed a disturbance in the Force and decided to double down on their efforts.

The first two weeks in June are the Open Enrollment period for resetting all company benefits. (Last year, the director scheduled a three-day off-site “team building” meeting for the entire department during this time, which I know because I got an out-of-office email response announcing it, when I tried to get clarification on one of the benefits.) Open Enrollment is preceded by all-staff meetings where representatives of the various providers get up on their hind legs to try to convince us that higher premiums and lower coverage are definitely the way to go.

At any rate, HR has been sending out a blizzard of emails reminding us that these meetings are being held, with accompanying Go-to-Meeting details if you want to attend virtually. (I am not making this up: there were at least five system-generated emails reminding registrants that the all-important Open Enrollment webinar would start in three days, then one day, then one hour, then 30 minutes, then five minutes.)

Since I do not fancy being stuck in an auditorium for 90 minutes to glean 12 minutes of pertinent information (Kaiser, no) and watching HR swan about like beauty pageant contestants, I registered for the GTM webinar yesterday. At the appointed time I launched the web client and dialed in (this crowd has never mastered the art of running audio over the web, so you have to call as well as launch). And I waited. And waited. And waited. (Think Casablanca levels of waiting.) I got thrown off the audio twice because the webinar had not begun.

Finally, 21 minutes after this big event was to have started, this went out:

Every time I think they cannot possibly underperform worse than any given instance, I discover that I have underestimated them completely, and they are indeed capable of plumbing ever darker depths of amateur-hour incompetence.

Seriously: could not organise one.