Wow!
Quite an eventful morning today.
First, I sit down and check my E-Mail at 9:43 this morning, and I receive a message from our local HR director saying she wants to see me when I have a moment. Okay, I can do that. So I walk over to her office, knock politely, and ask "You wanted to see me?"
"Yes. Did you meet the woman who was down here last week giving the Sexual Harassment Presentation?" Uh Oh....
"I didn't meet her personally, but I attended. What's up?" At this point, I'm thinking "Shit! The woman I asked to lunch said something to HR. Fuck!"
"Well, she happened to pass by your office and saw your Britney Spears pictures." (This is where I cracked a smile.) "She asked that you take them down."
As soon as she said "pass by your office", I knew what was coming - it was somewhat expected. So I chuckled, said "Okay, will do.", and proceeded to take down my pictures.
This woman was personally offended. Awwwww.
It's amazing that an overly sensitive, insecure corporate monkey flies down to an office which was formerly another company (that her company subsequently purchased), and becomes The Enforcer. It would have made more sense to ask around the office, something to the effect of "Do the pictures in this office offend you?", but corporate monkeys don't work like that. Plus, the fact that she was supposedly "personally offended" means the damage is done. Like a good monkey, she proceeded to OOOK and AAAK her documented rules and piss everyone off in the process. So now my office is a sterile shadow of its former self, because I had to take down all of my Britney Spears pictures, INCLUDING a poster that our very own director of sales purchased for me. The complaintant is now about 870 miles away, and if the pictures were to go back up, she would never hear about it because nobody here cares.
On the bright side, our beloved VP/GM of our local office went to bat for me, and called up this woman. While I don't have any pull to argue with corporate, he certainly does. He told me in the break room that they shouldn't be concerned, unless there was any explicity in the pictures, or as he put it, "tits and ass." The pictures contain no such content.
Now I'm going to tile my office with hospital-style tile, and E-Mail a picture of it to her with a little note stating that it is now a "sterile environment."
On another note with more company fun, we had a phone meeting this morning regarding usability of our company's intranet. The maintainers of the intranet love to put Microsoft Word documents up, but these documents aren't easily accessed by those of us who don't use Windows. I suggested the idea of plain text or HTML companion documents on the website.
They weren't receptive to this idea, and actually dismissed my concerns with inane arguments like "HTML changes the look and feel of the document" and "I hate saving documents in other formats."
Later, one of the organizers asked for opinions on what "whiz-bang" stuff they can add to the intranet. He actually used the words "whiz-bang." Gee, I thought this meeting was to gather feedback on usability - not suggestions on cool features.
<SARCASM> I love being directed by clueless idiots. </SARCASM>
Lunch Log: Skipped Lunch. Not hungry.
UPDATE: We're fighthing the Britney opression! Our COO thinks this is the stupidest thing he's ever heard. I've been instructed NOT to take my pictures home just yet.