No, not in the strict ‘in your next life’ sense; but in the colloquial ‘what goes around comes around in this life’ sense.
In a large coprporation where I was employed there was a sexual harassment awareness meeting. The person giving the presentation is ‘B’. Sexual harassment was not a problem in our department. Except for one guy. He was a bit old, and was raised in a male-dominated culture. Some of his jokes wore very thin on a couple of our coworkers, but they knew he didn’t mean any harm. They wouldn’t report him to HR, but they were worried someone would and he would get in trouble. I ronically, he was sick the day of the presentation.
Anyway. B. was a manager in HR. Her demeanour was stereotypical of someone in her position. Her voice was carefully crafted to sound ‘caring’. She appeared to take an interest in what people said. Only she was obviously a soulless corporate drone. Her act, which I’m sure she believed herself, was transparent to everyone except other corporate drones. The presentation included videos of situations where sexual harassment occurred. All but one depicted men harassing women. When one guy (a supervisor) mentioned that women also sexually harass men, and that it was unfair that nearly all of the sketches showed men in a bad light, she replied that men are more likely to sexually harass women than vice versa. True enough, but the way she made her reply sounded a lot like ‘Men are pigs. Shut up.’
But this post isn’t about sexual harassment. This is just the first time I met this woman. It’s meant as a little vignette to show, I hope, the way she communicates. Let me expand on that. When talking with her, she had a habit of folding her hands and looking earnestly at the speaker with an inane smile on her face. Her eyes were meant to show interest. But ‘the eyes are the windows to the soul’. You could tell by looking at her that she didn’t care what you were saying. And her little HR sing-song voice that was meant to sooth reminded me of some sort of robot. After listening carefully to what people would say, supporting their case with statistics, reports, logical arguments, and so forth, she would say something like ‘That’s very interesting! Excellent idea! I’ll present it to [whomever].’ And then, of course, she’d never do anything about it. (Once though, I came to her with an idea to increase corporate profits, inprove the quality and quantity of our data, and become a real thorn in the side of a major competitor. One of the company presidents mentioned it in a meeting, saying it was B.'s idea.)
This woman became out department vice president. One time our department manager was in a meeting with her and other managers and VPs. He said of someone, ‘She’s a smart girl.’ B. came unglued and chastised him in front of everyone for calling a woman a ‘girl’. I know it’s politically incorrect to call someone a ‘girl’, but the guy’s from Texas. Texans I’ve known often use ‘girl’ or (shudder) even ‘gal’ when speaking of women. It’s just the way they talk. Had I been in the meeting, I would have taken our manager’s comment as this: ‘She is a smart person who really knows her job.’ B.'s take seems to have been: ‘She’s smart for a member of the weaker sex.’ In other words, she seems to have taken the comment as ‘By calling this smart person a girl, you are implying that women are not as proficient in their jobs as men. Your comment, though you believe it to be a compliment, is undermined because you imply with the word ‘girl’ that men are superior. Men are pigs.’
Of course I’m making assumptions here. But I’m trying to illustrate her attitude and demeanour.
When she became our VP, she disparaged our part of the company. Sort of ‘Well, in my old division, we did things differently! And we’re better than you!’ Her actions indicated that she didn’t care about the department. They indicated that she did not understand the was we receive our data. While her old division required that every data contributor send us data in a specified industry-standard format, our much smaller division can’t be so choosy. Our data contributors require a lot more attention. I wrote several programmes that became standard in our department that we could ‘plug into’ preprocessors. These programmes increased the quality and quantity of our data greatly. After half of the department were laid off, I heard that she decreed that these programmes would no longer be used. Nor would other programmes we’d been using for years. No, the contributors must give us their data our way. If they didn’t want to do that, then they could just go away. In my opinion, this is not a good way for a small division to operate. We need that data. And hundreds or thousands of our contributors do not have the resources or inclination to change the way they do things just on our account.
And everyone in business knows that the best way to increase profits is to fire people! A company from India (ironically named Tata) came in to work on improving our system. A new processing system our department had spent a year developing and testing (in addition to our normal duties) was turned over to them. Half of us were laid off. The problem is though, that they didn’t know the data. We did. The upshot is this: B. got rid of those pesky people who knew the data, knew the contributors, and knew what it took to get good data into the system. In 2005 the Indians were gone. The New And Improved System, which cost the company millions of dollars, was scrapped. (The division had a habit over the nine years I was with the company of coming up with Grand Ideas, spending millions of dollars on them, and then scrapping them.)
Let me digress a little bit. Under the old system we ran data through preprocessors. When we had lots of data to process, some of us could increase the priority in the queue for the more important jobs. We Leads could call the computer guys in Texas and request more initiators. Under the New And Improved System, which was meant to process data much more quickly, only one set of data could be processed at a time. Priorities could not be set. No one’s data in the queue would run until the current job was finished. And the data took much longer to run. This was a problem with our accounts that had a million to three million lines. The jobs would take all day to run and no other work could be done. Worse, ours was a smaller division. The computer had to be shut down for maintenance every night, and if our data wasn’t finished then too bad. It would be halted and requeued.
So they went back to the old way of doing things. (And in all modesty, I was the best person in the department at writing the required programmes. But I was gone!)
So to summarise: B. seemd to be a Soulless Corporate Drone. She cared more for toeing the company line than bringing solutions suggested by the people who actually knew and worked with the data to the table. She increased profits in the short run, by cutting staff instead of improving the system.
Yesterday I got this e-mail (edited to remove names) from a former coworker who is still employed by the corporation:
Hey, I’m human. I admit to some Schadenfreude. Perhaps this feeling will cause some bad kharma for myself. But if B. is about to be ‘retired’, I can’t help thinking it couldn’t happen to a more deserving person.