Here is the next chapter in the saga of the company I've been doing some consulting work for since August '08.
I knew my former co-worker and pal wasn't terribly happy in his HR position. You might recall "management" was bringing in an outside consultant to evaluate the department. I declined to attend and was later contacted by the consultant (interestingly enough, someone who I'd reviewed an offer package on for THE top HR job there but that never came to pass) so he could tell me he didn't need to talk to me. Uh, ok; didn't INTEND to talk to you, matey!
Anyway, life went on, bringing dribs and drabs of offers and various questions from that neck of the woods.
Then, this past Monday, I received an email from the 2nd in command HR person informing me that my pal had moved on to sales and marketing and she needed quite a bit of help putting together generic job descriptions and perhaps some other generalist work, such as writing policies.
Ok, in all honesty, these are probably two HR tasks that I loathe more than anything else (although easy enough for me to perform as I do seem to have the gift of the pen); the only worse thing, IMO, would be if she'd told me she wanted me to write an AAP; ugh (or, perhaps, lay people off. Never fun for anyone involved).
She sent me a grid of JDs to write; generic JDs (not geriatric); meaning, very, very general; nothing specific to a particular job. In addition to rank and file, there are a lot of executive JDs they need (which will be even MORE generic, since, last I looked, most companies don't have job descriptions per se for their executives). And, man, talk about the levels. Japanese companies are supposed to be lean? Not this puppy. In one management grade alone, here are the positions: Division Director. Director. Senior Director. Assistant Vice President. Vice President. Senior Vice President. Crikey!
But, hey, yours truly is not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. If they are willing to pay me my hourly rate to perform tasks that a very junior level HR person in another company (like the one I used to work for) could easily do, that's their business.
Gotta get the old thesaurus out, of course, to find ump-teen other ways to say "responsible for" or "proactively" or "is required".
What all this means, of course, is I'm not living the life of Riley right now. I'm actually WORKING quite a few hours every day. This means little time for blogging, Facebook, chipping away at my projects, etc.
So, there you have it. This is what's been keeping me from y'all.
Until this particular gravy train leaves the station, that is.
BTW, The idiom "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth" never made much sense to me, or at least I didn't try overly hard to figure it out. Since I keep saying it, I figured I'd ponder it.
Before I look it up, this is what I THINK it means:
"If someone, for absolutely no reason, gives you a gift of a horse, don't open its mouth to check how old it is, how healthy, or if it has rotten teeth, just be thankful you now have a horse. In other words, don't either make too much or too little about it".
...from Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms (left-over resource from my brief foray into teaching English)
"To criticize or refuse to take something that has been offered to you".
Origin: "Based on the idea that you can discover a lot about a horse's condition by looking at its teeth".
I guess I picked up something from that foray, as well!
Mrs. B
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