Old Joe Grady, the Human Resource
One day Old Joe Grady ran out of money in a strange kind of a place. He couldn't find anybody who would give him the time of day, much less a lead on finding a job. Where he was, he discovered, was smack in the middle of a city. Finally somebody told him that he might find work at the company. What company, Joe wanted to know. But the person who gave him the lead had already disappeared. So Old Joe headed for the tallest building he could see, figuring something that big had to be owned by a company.
Behind a desk just inside the door was a man that looked like a police officer. He wanted to know who Old Joe needed to see. Old Joe asked if there had been a robbery or murder. The man said he didn't know. He just needed to write down the name of everybody who came in, where they were going and when they planned to leave. Security, he called it. When he found out that Old Joe Grady was looking for work, he directed him to an office marked Human Resources. There a pleasant looking woman handed him some forms to fill out.
What exactly is a human resource? Old Joe asked. Sounds like somebody who fell into a hole in the ground and a million years later spurted back up as a quart of oil.
The woman smiled. Patience was listed near pleasant high on her profile of employment assets. And she could see she was going to need it.
We call our employees human resources. It makes them feel valuable, the most important of all our resources, not just workers who do a job for us and that's it. The Department of Human Resources makes sure our people are taken care of, their wages and benefits are fair, their health care needs are met, that sort of thing. Is there something I can do for you? We're also in charge of hiring.
To make a long story short, Old Joe took a job in the shipping department. His boss seemed a fair enough fellow, and the work was easy to learn how to do. And he got a kick out of outsmarting the computer that kept the inventory. The problem with computer kept inventory is that it is not real world inventory. Life would be much easier in the shipping department, Old Joe Grady thought, if some extra items could be kept on hand for emergencies. So Joe arranged for a friend to order a dozen boxes of every stock item in hot demand, and then Joe put a hold on the order. The computer made sure the extra boxes were always there but never charged them to anybody. No one ever knew how Joe's department was able to fill certain difficult orders when none of the other shipping departments could.
One thing Old Joe never got used to, though, was being called a human resource. He liked to think of himself as a worker, someone with a blue collar or a red neck, a little color somewhere. Or even an employee. A worker was someone who worked, an employee somebody who was hired to do a job. Not fancy titles, but they told it like it was. Employee was a little bland, but worker suggested a sweaty somebody, somebody who could get mad and start cussing, somebody who might be missing a finger or an arm or who might have had some teeth knocked out learning the trade. Or maybe just learning how to get along with somebody else already in the trade.
Human resource was hard to get your arms around. Sounded like a piece of equipment with some human qualities, something you cared about enough to take out a maintenance contract on it, but not to worry over it or grab it by the scruff of its neck. Now Old Joe Grady didn't know what a neck scruff was, but he was pretty sure that a human resource wouldn't have one.