Sob stories
Eight novels that feature some spectacular HR offencesFor the true HR professional, not even reclining amid piles of paperbacks and glowing Kindle screens can offer respite from staff disputes, petty office rivalries and breaches of policy.
You might try to put the job behind you for a day or two, but pick up almost any novel – from the classics to potboilers, from low crime to high culture – and before chapter 3 you’re itching to throw a highlighted copy of the staff handbook at someone’s head.
And so, with apologies, here are eight novels best avoided if you’re to avoid a surge in blood pressure.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DH Lawrence
HR issue: Sexual harassment in the workplace
If ever an employer needed a stern word or two about reining it in a bit on the flirtation front, it’s Lady Constance Chatterley. It’s all very well swooning at the lush prose and the game-keeper’s glistening muscles and what have you, but the true HR professional will balk at the idea of an employer imposing on her staff with such abandon.
Sympathise as one must with poor loveless Connie, there’s no excuse for such a blatant abuse of power. Poor Mellors! That’s no place to hang a daisy chain!
Dracula, Bram Stoker
HR issue: Abuse of expenses
Hapless young lawyer goes off to foreign parts with a folder of documents and a strict brief as to allowable expenses (1 x return train ticket, economy class; overnight subsistence), and returns months later with no receipts.
Yes, Jonathan Harker. Yes. Please allow this small and impecunious firm to refund you for a lengthy stay in a chateau, what we can only assume has been a limitless bar tab, and bout of recovery in a spa run by nuns. No, really. It’s fine. Great, a dry-cleaning bill for blood on your shirt-collars. Happy to oblige.
American Psycho, Brett Easton Ellis
HR issue: Just an absolute maniac, frankly
Anyone who has spent longer than a few months in an office will know there’s often a character in whose presence the skin begins to creep. Even if they appear perfectly amiable, one suspects they’re but one stiff email away from slaughtering the entire HR department with a staple gun.
Enter Patrick Bateman, the epitome of the 80s Wall Street investment banker – 6 foot of perma-tanned evil wrapped in Armani lambswool. Alas, even the massed ranks of the CIPD can’t help you: your only recourse is to run for your lives and take the staple gun with you.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell
HR issue: Walking out on the job
In Orwell’s novel of frustrated artistic endeavour, Gordon Comstock is employed as an advertising copywriter – and does it every bit as grudgingly as any would-be novelist holed up in an overheated Shoreditch digital media agency.
He churns out advertisements for face creams and gravy granules with deadening puns, descending into such self-loathing he eventually quits, forgoing his meagre salary in favour of starving in a garret – whilst, of course, still not really getting that slim volume of verse written.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
HR issue: Use of unpaid interns
The use of unpaid interns – especially in the media – is rightly deplored by any HR pro with a social conscience. It does little more than reward those who can live in Daddy’s Islington flat rent-free for a year in order to prise their way into notoriously closed-door industries.
Alas for the ever-growing ranks of Sherlockians, Holmes himself was not above the use of the unpaid intern, as his band of Baker Street Irregulars attest. All that scurrying barefoot through the grim streets of 19th century London for the odd shilling? Disgraceful, and not what we expect from our hero.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
HR issue: Breaching health and safety protocol
Coleridge’s glorious narrative poem of maritime mishap is rightly adored. But rarely has the need for a firmly implemented health and safety procedure in the workplace been so apparent. If we all felt the need to start shooting rare birds out of the sky during a particularly stultifying afternoon in the office the UK workforce would be halved by Thursday.
By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, as the poem should really have begun had Coleridge an ounce of sense, what the blazes did you think was going to sodding happen when you let loose with a crossbow on a crowded boat!?
Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene
HR issue: Ineffective management, no clear job objectives
Management isn’t easy. Too much can go wrong when tasked with supervising and nourishing the careers of fellow staff. But as the hapless Havana-based vacuum cleaner salesman Wormold discovers in Greene’s satirical novel, there are some employees who, left to their own devices, are more than capable of risking the security of whole nations.
When Wormold is approached by the Secret Services to gather state secrets, his complete unfitness to the task leads him to send to London careful drawings of vacuum cleaner parts, which he passes off as plans for a military installation. A mid-year review and a few firm objectives could have averted at least one murder and, worse, the death of a Dachshund.
Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville
HR issue: Repeated failure to meet basic competencies
Bartleby is employed by an American law firm as a scrivener, a task which largely entails copying out screeds of legal text. Our sympathies are immediately engaged: who would want to spend 9 to 5 occupied in such a dreary role?
Nonetheless, having once been an industrious worker Bartleby begins to behave in the most passive-aggressive manner imaginable, and would drive the most tender-hearted and sympathetic HR officer to violence. Asked to undertake any task he simply replies “I would prefer not to,” and eventually dies of starvation, having evidently preferred not to eat. “Ah humanity!” sighs the narrator at the end – a sigh with which many of us are only too familiar.
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