HR Hairdos

Yesterday I went to a client's downtown office tower (it's named after them) to attend an HR meeting. Dimmed fluorescent lights, giant computer screens that go up and down and up and down, little electronic badges to get in and out of bathrooms, grey metal cubicles that make even the most lackadaisacal african violet look like a brash statement in chlorophyll, boys in blue shirts, girls in sad shoes. Breaks the heart, it does.

And at the meeting, the typical HR bonnet-hairs but also two surprises--wonderful, hysterical, hostile surprises.

1. Bitter puffy woman in love with her documents in pink plaid jacket (her, not the documents) and sharpest tongue this side of Gene Simmons--not the sort I'd take, for example, my bereavement or serious illness problems to. She sassed everyone and kept drawing the focus of the other 12 people at the table to the specific verbiage in her long-outdated powerpoint employee orientation. Slide 4 must not be changed. She wrote it with purpose.

2. Surprise number two: a genius problem child in post-post-modern spectacles; a geophysics PhD who can't get along with anyone but is too smart NOT to sue if dismissed and who as a result has been moved to an obscure HR team where he can unleash his powers of evil in a little, contained geography all his own. Anglo-Indian with all the twee banter of the left side of the hyphen and the effusive abusive sarcasm of the right side of the hyphen. I couldn't take my eyes off him. Plus his name is *not* actually--but rhymes with--"Mittens," which my partner called him for four hours and no one bothered to tell her because it was so funny.

Watching all the scampering, the muttering, the elbowing, the forms, the photocopiers, the corporate branding on every door. . . . the tuna waldorf wraps on the lunch tray . . . . today I look around my cluttered home office just down the hall from my cluttered kitchen and around the corner from my cluttered living room, turn up the World Beat, wear inappropriately red lipstick and my Stanfield's long underwear and dance my way through a boring project with joy in my heart.