Unfiltered Story #299844

In a previous job, we had a HR Director that was a real work of art. She was always making mistakes, or saying weird things as serious answers.

For example, she would usually send 3 e-mails. The first one would be “you will find attached”… without said attachment. She would then send a second e-mail with the attachment, and then a third e-mails saying to disregard the first two, that there was an error in the attachment and she was now sending the correct version.

This was so much of a classic, that her name became the very act of forgetting to attach a file to an e-mail. “Hey you did an [HR], you forgot the file.”

She would send “office closing times” memo for holidays, copying/pasting them from the previous years… without changing the dates. Like Easter 2020 would have the dates from 2019 on it, or the French and English versions would have different dates.

She did that “mistake” on her automated out-of-office e-mail for vacations, with different dates for English and French versions.
More than once.

I was in maintenance. We had three working shifts of 8 hours. There was nobody for the night shift, so one of us would be “stand-by call”. We were given $10 for every 8 hours shifts of stand-by duty, with the standard 3 hours minimum if we got called-in. However, on the weekends, nobody was working, so it was stand-by only. The problem was that we were given $25 for the day. My boss tried to fight it but he got nowhere.
I once went to her and said:

[me] “If we’re supposed to get $10 for one 8 hours shift, shouldn’t we get $30 on the weekend? There’s three, 8-hours shifts in a day. It’s a compensation for being available, ready to come in within an hour.”
[HR] “Well. I love cocooning. I would be happy to get paid $25/day to stay around the house and take care of my flowers.”

I turned around and left… No need to pursue the matter. It was like talking to a… house plant.

The plant was 100km from the head office and the sales team and stuff. One time, she was at our plant. She was passing by the cafeteria and she saw me.
[HR] “Oh, [my name], happy birthday! It’s today, right?”
[Me] “Thanks… but that was over two weeks ago.”
[HR] “Really? Oh well, I just saw it today on Linked In… Happy birthday anyway.” she said, walking away, all happy and smiling like saying to herself “I did good, I wished happy birthday to an employee!”

Note: we were less than 100 employees.

One day, she sent an official memo from the CEO through E-mail. However, instead of sending just said “official” memo, she sent the whole chain of e-mails exchange between herself, the CEO, the CFO and every other person involved in this critical memo, from the first draft, with all the corrections, up the the last version. That was fun to read.

She was let go not long after that. I wonder why…