Watch Me Entertain Myself!

Sacha Guitry once said, "You can pretend to be serious, but you can't pretend to be witty." Oh yes, I'm the great pretender.
(pilot episode: 20 January 2004)

Thursday, March 04, 2010

How Gee!

In any company there’ll be one department that everyone is annoyed or angry at. I noticed that for the past two companies I worked in, it was the IT department (in the early days of the computer, hiring decent IT personnel was a problem). With my current company, it’s the Human Resources or HR Department.

To be fair, our HR personnel came from the mother company to which ours is aligned with—the same family owns them. And the mother company is a more traditional trading company, while we’re a broadcast network. Our HR isn’t used to the peculiarities of production, thus the source of much conflict and misunderstanding.

But sometimes they really make you wonder. Like, for instance, today.

At a little past 4pm the whole building was plunged into darkness. It was the scheduled brownout. People were milling around the exit, wondering out loud if the power outage would take long; most felt that, if it’ll reach 3 hours long, might as well call it a day. You see, our building generators could only provide just enough power to operate the elevators, keep some lights on in the stairway and provide electricity to only a few select offices (mostly upper management and admin).

Past 4:30pm, after consulting with upper management and ascertaining that the brownout was indeed 3 hours long, HR announced that people could now go home.

The catch? They sent the announcement via email.

19 comments:

rudeboy said...

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

sky said...

Playing the devil here... maybe they assumed all of you have laptops.

joelmcvie said...

@SKY: I was using my laptop when the brownout hit. The office server didn't shut down, but the office WIFI on all floors (except the floor of upper management) were cut off.

Besides the ratio of desktops to laptops is a lopsided one in favor of desktops. =)

E said...

:-) thank God for dumb folks, they boost my ego :-)

citybuoy said...

*tambling* ang galing ng hr niyo. dapat silang awardan.

Guyrony said...

You have to applaud the HR people for thinking out of the box.

Sending e-mail about the blackout.

Bravo HR!

That's being very ingenious.

One for the trash pile.

Darc Diarist said...

lol. nahihiya ako para sa HR. for real... :)

Kane said...

Honey!!!! The question is: Anong sinabi mo sa reply mo???

joelmcvie said...

IN THE INTEREST OF FAIR PLAY:

This morning I was at HR, and I joked about their email. They said they knew people wouldn't receive it, which is why they had their staff go from floor to floor to announce the news. But they issued the email just the same for the record.

So there. (See how judicious editing of a story can change the tone? Hahaha.) =)

Anonymous said...

proof lang naman pala yung email. alam naman nilang walang makakabasa. hehehe

Anonymous said...

This is definitely a ROFLCOPTERS moment! Hahaha. This definitely reminds me why I loved reading Reader's Digest "Life is like that" section. :P

Ming Meows said...

pero nag-issue pa rin ng email. LoL!
I-contribute na yan sa Reader's Digest.

Nimmeru@yahoo.com said...

nice one HR. for documentation lang naman paka ung email. palakpakan naman diyan... :)

Unknown said...

"They said they knew people wouldn't receive it, which is why they had their staff go from floor to floor to announce the news. But they issued the email just the same for the record."

Of course, of course. :)

joelmcvie said...

Yes I changed the title, but only because someone from Canada asked me to.

Mac Callister said...

hahaha!ano ba yan!

Yj said...

award nga! bwahahahahaha

~Carrie~ said...

Good thing you changed the title. Ikanga ni Badinggerzie, harsh eh.

Anonymous said...

OMG, I love your Human Resources already. Must be fun where you work!