And now, before I pull away from the coffee shop parking lot and return to my Internet-less home, I want to share something brief with you, in part because I can’t wait to read the comments it sparks.

Tonight I was having coffee at the home of friends, and met a relative of theirs from out-of-state. He’s a reader of this blog, as it turns out, and works for a multinational corporation. We talked for a while about the awfulness of customer service — I tell everybody I meet these days about AT&T, and I find that nearly all of them have similar stories about AT&T’s horrible customer service — when he brought up a parallel evil afflicting the modern world: the Human Resources Department.

He told me that it seems that his company — one of the world’s wealthiest and most consequential — is run by its HR department. They issue hiring directions that are only tangentially related to the actual needs of the various departments, and nobody can figure out why they do what they do, or why no one in a position to stand up to them will do so. It is one of the mysteries of our era. I don’t think I’ve ever worked for a company whose HR department is as bad as his — and truth to tell, I’ve had helpful experiences in some HR departments I’ve deal with. But I must admit that I’ve worked at companies in which the employees, even the managers, have not been able to understand why HR does what it does, because their activities don’t seem to serve the mission of the company, nor have they understood why senior management tolerates it.

Tell us your HR horror experiences. It’s funny how “human resources” and “customer service” both have taken on Orwellian meanings, because they connote the absolute opposite of what they’re supposed to mean.

UPDATE: An HR story I shared with my interlocutor yesterday. I once worked at a company in which I was unjustly accused of a particular offense. The accusation was hysterical. My manager came to me with it because the colleague who made it used the term “hostile work environment” to describe my action. I told my manager this was absolutely ridiculous, and explained why. My manager kept a poker face, quite properly, but I am sure that my manager agreed with me. But I further told my manager that if I stood up to this bullying hysteric, the whole matter would go to Human Resources, and because as far as I could tell the prime directive of our company’s HR was to prevent lawsuits, that HR would find a way to fire me, even though I was the wronged one in this case. I didn’t have the patience to go through with it. So I swallowed my dignity and restored harmony vis-a-vis the complainant. I hated myself for doing this, but I had absolutely no faith that HR would be fair, and every confidence that it would try to head off the prospect of a Hostile Work Environment lawsuit, no matter how absurd such a thing would be.