Dealing with HR, or working for HR.
I am currently the front desk person for a large scale public institution in my area for HR. I work with some of the most incompetent and sociopathic people I have ever met, and yet also some of the most empathetic. The incompetent sociopaths hide in plain sight by putting a lot of work on the people who give a shit. I'm one of those people; I come from a pro-union background and I am personally a socialist. I knew before starting this job that I was in for anti-union, anti-employee vitriol, but not like this. Lean six sigma and other such programs have gone so far that HR, at least my HR, is a misshapen beast that can no longer handle even the most basic tasks efficiently. Popular writers on HR will tell you that HR is ideally not supposed to be focused on the employee and making their lives better, but smooth processes and adherence to legal procedure should yield the result as a side effect. Pfff, couldn't be further from the truth. The truth is these fucks don't even care about making it better, they have 80 meetings a week and let it go one ear, out the other. Multiple directors I speak with laugh when I ask them to call people back or respond to messages. Then they go and have 1.5 hour lunches, and come back and spring surprise file pulls on you 2 days before due. This rant is getting long but the TLDR is that, if you ever feel like HR is shit and unresponsive, you are right… And it is because it is run by The Joker.