I am lost without HR.

For years of my life, HR worked to influence what I thought and did to ensure that my conduct was businesslike; professional.

HR obviously failed in nearly every possible way, but just as I'm certain a prisoner slowly destroyed by Chinese water torture misses that black art the day he's freed, I miss HR.

Before I arrived on the corporate scene, I had a very relaxed attitude toward what HR calls "diversity."

For example, if I was talking to a black guy named Frank, then I was talking to a black guy named Frank. His ethnicity was important to me in that he was obviously a different color than I am. Beyond that, it wouldn't have had any other effect. It was a superficial way of seeing differences, which is also the best way of seeing certain differences. I'm not blind - like I said, I think I would have noticed that Frank was black. I would not, however, have measured everything he said and did against that one quality.

It was so complicated back then.

Then corporate life began, and so did HR "sensitivity training." Nobody bothered to ask me how I feel about "diversity" and other HRiffic topics. I was sucked into the fold as though however I saw the world regarding "diversity" was inadequate, and only HR could save me from myself.

I'm glad they got to me in time. Where I used to disregard things as unimportant as someone's ethnicity (we're all just people), HR did everything it could to teach me that people are very, very different, and that I need to constantly see that.

In my old world, Frank would have been that one guy who, by the by, was black.

In my new world, Frank was an African-American who had deep roots in some other country somewhere from some time, and bad things happened, and so on and so forth, and although he looked perfectly happy during our water cooler chats, he was dying on the inside because I repeatedly failed to recognize his diversity in conversation and tell him how amazing I thought it was that he was born with more melanin than I was.

What's so great about the HR viewpoint is that Frank is no longer just one of the guys. Now he has this label that separates him out from the community and puts a sort of spotlight on him.

Old way: Frank was a guy like the rest of us.

New way: Frank is an African-American, which is profoundly different from being a plain old American. After all, he was born in the same town I was born in - how could we possibly know anything about each other without "sensitivity training" and PC labels? We need to single him out as often as possible to recognize his diversity. Only then can the people who developed this HR program shed their White Guilt.

Labels like "African-American" segregate. It's the stupidest thing ever invented in a time when people are supposed to be going about life without telling each other where to sit on the bus and what bathroom to use and other crap like that.

Note that, if you do happen to be an African living in America, then the label makes perfect sense. It can be confusing, though - a very good friend of mine from a few years back is a white guy, born in Uganda, who is more of an African-American than most of the people in this country to whom the label is applied.

Is this all seeming silly yet?

The best part of all is that HR mostly just pisses people off. It confuses them. It tries to force people to change the way they see the world whether they want to or not.

You wind up with "initiatives." I hate these things. These are weapons assembled by HR that are used to beat you in the face with an idea. Over and over. You're never quite sure what they're asking of you, but it hurts.

Nobody gets the point.

Nobody learns a damn thing.

I am lost without HR...