Human Resources

So Coldplay played Glatsonbury and unfortunately the ground did not open to swallow them up and send them to a special bland circle of hell where they had to listen to their own music over and over again . JK watched about ten minutes on TV and felt a little bit of his soul die, seeing 10,000s of people sway to the beige noodlings of Chris Martin - the audio equivalent of Farrow and Ball's neutral paint range. Simon Cowell's meat puppets are bad enough, but to stand in a field listening to that dirge is beyond comprehension. Give me Camp X-Ray and a long weekend of water-boarding any day.

But your favourite typing ape wants to ignore the news this week which we should probably do on a more regular basis. Ideally we should ignore 90% of everything we read in the media, the tricky part  is to work out which bits. Fortunately Melaine Phillips puts her name at the end of her nonsense so that's one care in the community rant off the list. No, JK wants to talk about a uniquely modern plague: 'Human Resources'. Once a company gets to a certain size, it has to employ staff in a department that used to be called 'Personnel', which was obviously an outdated term as it accurately described its function: to find people to work for the company and to keep those working for the company happy enough so they turned up for work more or less on time and didn't steal too much to dent the profits.  A simple, straightforward term so naturally you silly monkeys had to change it.

They have a saying: those who can do, those who can't do teach, those who can't teach, teach PE. Those who can't teach PE work in Human Resources. And those who can't work in Human Resources are clinically dead with no detectable brain stem activity and shuffle around as Saturday staff for Currys Digital. Now you might think it's a bit unfair to pick on one group of people for doing their job and it is true that HR workers perform a useful function of stapling CVs together and filing things, which even though it could be performed by a robot would be too expensive and frankly a waste of good automation. They don't cause much harm as long as you don't leave them unsupervised near scissors.

The phrase "Human Resources', introduced to make companies appear more caring, is in fact a deeply stupid and insulting term. People are not resources like mineral reserves or property, they are humans who have traded their time and effort with a company for money. It is all part of a modern management trend which uses token words as a substitute for actual management. For change management read redundancies; consultation means we've made up minds up already . One of the make-work exercises HR love to inflict on staff is the yearly wind-up of appraisals, where managers pretend to listen, staff make up development goals and the detailed work of fiction is filed away for next year, never to be looked at again.

Work, let's face it, for most of us is a pain hence the name 'work', the clue is in the title and we don't need patronising euphemisms like 'Human Resources'; the pay cheque turning up in bank account will do just fine. We're grown ups; we can handle reality and for those times when we can't there's always alcohol.