Remember when corporations had Personnel Departments instead of Human Resource Departments? I know some of you don't, as you were too young to be in the work force when that shift in nomenclature happened.
Shakespeare aside, names actually mean things, and language conveys meaning. In this case, it conveys the meaning that I'm no more valuable to a company than its office supplies. I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets this. It goes right along with the shift from corporations showing some amount of loyalty to their workforces to the complete disregard for them.
Every time I hear some tie wearing monkey moan about how employees show no loyalty to their employers, I merely think about the fact that I'm a stapler. Oh yes, and I also couple this with the corporate lack of anything approaching loyalty or respect towards its employees.
Respect, loyalty, willingness to put forth extra effort...these are all things that Corporate America wants and expects from its workforce, but somewhere along the line, they seem to have forgotten that those qualities require reciprocation.
Fuck 'em says I.
I will not respect a person or organization who does not respect me; I will show no loyalty to a person or organization who has no loyalty to me; I will not go out of my way to help a person or organization who will not do the same for me.
This. Is. Not. Hard.
And yet, Scott Adams has mad a career out of mocking this inability to realize it by most of the corporations on the planet.
Fortunately, my current employer is actually pretty damn good about these things (and I mean this, really, I could be making between fifteen and thirty thousand a year more than I do right now). Since the Raytheon buyout, I've been pleasantly surprised by their actually leaving us mostly alone (some things had to change; as part of Raytheon, we have to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and this has had some effects all across all bits of our organization, but that was expected. There are other things along those lines, but again, they're regulatory and Raytheon CAN'T allow us to not follow them since we're no longer a small company).
We still have an HR dept. instead of Personnel, and this bugs me, and probably always will. When I become Supreme Ruler of the Universe, that shit ends.