Stellar performance

Okay, I’m not going to dwell on this, but HR.

As you know from earlier this week, I was trying to get two basic HR functions accomplished before the end days: hire an intern and get accurate information about the company retirement plan. Still waiting to hear back from Ms. Talent Acquisition Partner about the intern (start date…Monday), and as for the retirement info…

I’ve mentioned before that the benefits manager does absolutely nothing until you’ve sent at least two emails and showed up at her office door. No change here: she ignored the first email, tossed out some unintelligible words when I resent (you forward the original email of days earlier so she knows you know she’s doing spit), and after two more rounds of, “So, does this mean [this] or what?” requests for clarification, she sniffed, “maybe it would be better if we meet in person.” But didn’t suggest a time or send a meeting request.

Well, fine. I sent her a meeting request for yesterday, during one of the vast blocks of time that her Outlook calendar indicated she was not busy. She declined the meeting without explanation and then sent this:

Do not know what to make of “let’s meet tomorrow, although I’m totally busy then” (and if she'd just set up a quick meeting on Wednesday, we'd both be out of our misery. Maybe), and in fact her Outlook calendar was booked for the whole day, starting at 0900. So I sent an invitation for 0830. And got that declined:

So I’m on the books for 0930. Send up prayers.

However. That’s not even the real point of this post. Or, it’s only part of the reason for this post. Because, while unable to fulfill the basic functions of the HR remit, the department announced yesterday morning that, hey, they’re running an employee awards program! Yippee!

Don’t believe me? Here:

I’m pretty sure the “excitement” does not extend beyond the doors of the HR office. But:

Plus:

All administered (including approval of nominations) by HR. (Please also notice that there’s no time constraint around these “awards”: are they made…quarterly? Annually? During a leap year? No tellin’.)

(Although there may be an amendment email. Lately there hasn’t been one directive or announcement out of that department that hasn’t been followed by a correction. Sometimes more than one. And I’m not making that up.)

I’m probably a cranky party pooper, but I’d really prefer that HR did their actual jobs before they started layering on smoke-and-mirrors “perks”. I’d also bet $50 that the request for “employee awards” came in considerably lower in priority than “company-supplied coffee and tea” on the employee survey.

TGIF, my brothers and sisters. TGIF.

Future tense

One of the many downsides of the Internet is that anyone with a connection and access to rudimentary graphics software can produce memes and start polluting the ether with them. This explains about 90% of the political crap you see out there—in all directions. But you also see it in the “business” world, particularly among those whose Twitter profiles are chockers with descriptors like “thought leader”, “keynote speaker”, “growth hacker”, “ninja” and “author”. (Keep in mind that anyone can slap together a few pages of drivel, PDF it and offer it online, thus entitling their self-styling. They don’t ever use the word “writer”.)

Frankly—if your profile doesn’t include some tangible connection to actual, you know, operational business, then you can keynote your ass out of my timeline, because first among your descriptors should be “poseur”. That’s your real defining characteristic.

Anyhoo, this crowd is really big on tweeting what they consider either pithy or inspirational (or perhaps inspirationally pithy) “quotes” to up their traffic stats. Then they get retweeted, which only encourages them to produce more, and so it goes. Typically they post a meme—even if it’s only putting the words into a graphic—and often repeat the words in their tweet. In case you find a meme tl:dr.

Someone I follow on my professional Twitter account, who has a frankly disturbing headshot, claims to be Chief Marketing Officer of a Utah company that produces a technology learning platform (yeah—I don’t really care), into tech, marketing, SaaS, start-ups, and is data-driven and mother of three boys (whew!). Yesterday morning she tweeted this:

It did not seem like anything the 16^th President of the United States would have said, so I did what everyone who sees something like this should do: I Googled it. And, indeed, the first time something like this sentiment was used was in a book published in 1963, according to this site, which appears to be the Snopes of quotes.

I replied to super-marketer-mom pointing out that her little ray of encouragement dated from about 100 years after Lincoln’s death. (Hey—I was polite. And I provided the same link that I did here.)

She ignored me and left her tweet up. But she unfollowed me.

There’s a lesson here—probably several, actually—about not being such a muppet for aphorisms, or about pushing them out uncritically to the Twitterverse, or about actual engagement via the social media you claim to be expert at.

As for me, my lesson is that I’ve now unfollowed her, as well.

Market report

Yeah, okay—you’ve heard me kvetch about HR before, and I’m struggling with them again this week.

(First: trying to get an intern hired. The process that ticked along just fine six months ago with HR doing nothing except ensuring that all the legalities were adhered to and extending the actual offer has now slowed to a crawl, since a “Talent Acquisition Partner”* has been inserted into it. I can’t access online applications directly, but have to wait for Ms. TAP to send them to me. So far, aside from the ones who applied to other internship openings and have neither awareness of, interest in nor qualifications for what I need done, she has forwarded only one application. From someone in Texas. Who requires visa sponsorship. “Oh, oops—I missed that,” was the response when I queried her on that, since I can no longer view the actual applications at all, where work status is clearly stated. The one candidate I knew to be qualified and interested, because he was referred by a Georgetown entrepreneurship professor, didn’t make it to me until I asked where the application I knew he’d submitted was. After I interviewed the candidate, I asked Ms. TAP to move this along post haste, and so far have had nothing but crickets in reply. Summer is indeed i-cumen in, but it’s fast a-waning, too, pet.

*No, I am not making that title up. I’m sure the director spent many hours agonizing over the decision to call an assistant recruiter a Talent Acquisition Partner.

(Second: trying to get information on benefits, specifically on regulations around the retirement plan. The benefits “manager” has form WRT non-responsiveness. She generally doesn’t reply to inquiries until you’ve sent at least two emails and dropped by her office. And that’s when she’s not out at some conference or workshop, aimed no doubt at improving her evasion skills. Hon: I’d like the information before I actually hit mandatory retirement age. Or die.)

But today I’m turning my guns to the other department that, in my experience, just cannot seem to get their ducks on a single body of water, much less in a row. That would be Marketing. And in this organization, Marketing seems even scattier than in others I’ve worked in.

As in: every single time I’ve been involved in a project that requires marketing support, word has come back with much hand-flapping that “there’s no bandwidth” in the department.

God give me strength—what do they do?

A couple of weeks ago there was a long-overdue “shake up” in Marketing, and the director has left the company. But those who remain…well, I’m still asking the question in the preceding graf. One fellow, with an MBA in marketing from Drexel, went through the first iteration of our ideation course but never seemed to grasp the notion that a business idea needs to be feasible and it needs to be capable of generating income. He actually submitted one of his pitch competition ideas to me. The submission wouldn’t fill the back of a cocktail napkin, omitting such things as who’s already doing this, what the revenue model would be and level of effort to stand it up. Also, pro tip: consider, before touting an idea for professional networking functionality, that one of the people to whom you’re pitching it is running a platform that he considers already covers this feature set.

But there’s another marketing person—not a recommendation for the MBA program at American University—who signed up for the second cohort of the class, could not be arsed to introduce herself or post assignments to the online collaboration platform, didn’t show up to the third class, and waited a week to respond to my email asking if she’s not going to continue with it. (Recall that we’ve forked over a lot of dosh to the instructor, and that we’ve already witnessed nearly half the class just shrug it off.)

And here is her week-later reply:

Seriously? The wavy red lines in Microsoft products are your friends, cupcake. Pay attention to them. Because this makes you look like an ignoramus of the first order. Do you send out marketing materials looking like that?

Plus: she spelled my name wrong. My first name. After I’ve corrected her multiple times. What kind of marketer does that?

Well, the answer to that question, children, is one who’s worked here for several years.

So, here it is, hump day, and I can’t decide where to plant the gelignite—HR or Marketing. These are not good choices.

Where indeed

Man—what a week. And it’s only Tuesday morning. Damn.

And so, I have to admit that this cartoon resonates with me.

How ever shall I make it to Friday?

Gratitude Monday: Shabbat shalom

Saturday morning a friend of mine was called to the Torah. She was one of four members of the adult B’nai Mitzvah class who’ve been studying for more than a year to come before the congregation, read verses from the Torah and be officially recognized as full participants in Jewish life.

I say “officially” because from the brief statement each of the four gave about their journey to this ritual, it’s clear that they all have already been active contributors to Temple Beth El, and to leading whatever may be defined as a Jewish life. (Bar/bat mitzvah normally marks the shift from childhood to adulthood, and the taking on of responsibility for one’s ethical choices that comes with being an adult; it’s typically celebrated at age 13.) Three are from Jewish families, one is a convert.

It’s been my observation that Janet has long been living the sort of upright life that would earn the highest accolade I could give: although it might seem slightly gender-bending, she’s a mensch. Generosity, kindness, humor, wit, honesty, intelligence, pragmatism—all of them.

I’ve written before how she (and her husband) literally opened their home to me without ever so much as having a phone call, all on the basis of emails.

(The first phone conversation, as a matter of fact, was me in the pitch-dark of a rental car at Dulles Airport, as I was trying to figure out what the hell was up with the damned thing because there was no bloody ignition key. She laughed and told me that she’d come across the very same problem the previous week, but her husband had the solution: you dropped the fob in the well between the seats and pressed something. Voilà.)

Before that, on the basis of reading some of my posts during my period of unemployment, she’d reached out and made introductions to several people who might know of openings. You cannot know how rare that is, or how much it meant to me. It was, in fact, a mitzvah.

(Does she ask blunt and sometimes very disconcerting questions? Yes. Do I ever want to get on her bad side? Oh. Hell. No.)

Since my arrival in the environs of the District They Call Columbia, Janet has included me in several celebrations, including two Pesach Seders. I’ve been grateful for each of them and look forward to more.

On Saturday, in describing her decision to become bat mitzvah as an adult, Janet recounted how she was raised Jewish, and always pretty much felt Jewish—except for the period starting with college, when she proclaimed herself an atheist. (“It was the 70s,” she noted.) When her father became ill and she found herself praying for his recovery, she questioned whom (using proper case, of course) she could be praying to if not to God, and began that journey that led to Saturday.

Her assigned Torah verses in Numbers 8 were the ones about the Levites shedding their clothes and being shaved head to toe for a thorough bath. In her explication of the verses—once she got past the 13-year-old giggling about what the Levites must have looked like in their altogether—and hairless to boot—she beautifully tied it to the stripping away of the old and undergoing a ritual cleansing so as to emerge literally ready for a fresh start.

Look—it don’t come any fresher than stripped down to your birthday suit, hairless and squeaky clean. As Janet pointed out. It seemed to me a splendid set of verses to read for B’nai Mitzvah.

Janet is a master of languages—as you might have inferred from using correct case when holding inner dialogues. Her specialty is Russian, in which she is fluent enough to unequivocally disabuse a Moscow taxi driver of any delusions of fare gouging. (My lodgings back in December 2015 were what I referred to as the St. Petersburg suite, just off the Star Trek gallery.) Hebrew, however, is a different story, and she was struggling with it right up until the day. Something, I’m guessing, to do with the fact that not only do you have to reverse direction in reading, but figure out the missing vowels. Then there’s the chanting issue, and Janet is not musically gifted.

There were a couple of clams in her reading—which the non-Jews probably wouldn’t have noticed except for her hesitation and retries at the words. However, I am persuaded that the Almighty has heard considerably worse, and moreover knows the entire Torah literally backwards and forwards and therefore could be expected to fill in any deficiencies.

On the other hand, I’m betting that her quoting Morey Amsterdam isn’t something the Supreme Being has heard very often from the bimah.

All-in-all, it was a beautiful and moving ceremony. It was an honor to be asked to share this with Janet’s friends, and a unique opportunity for a Catholic to kvell.

Mazel tov, Janet.