How to Create a Company-Wide Panic

I have never been a fan of euphemism. I like clarity, while the entire point of euphemism is to blur and to obscure.

Even as long as thirty years ago, I could tell that human resources departments were becoming the automated euphemism dispensers of American corporate life. They are like corporate Xanax for managing employee anxiety.

Thus it was that sometime during the 1980’s or 1990’s—I don’t want to be too specific—while working for a small software startup, I received a euphemism-laden email from our tiny HR team. They were showing an acute sensitivity to being on the ragged edge of whatever hot and trendy topic had captured the enthusiasm of those occupying the world of personnel management. Not that they actually got the essential functions of HR right, far from it. But they were johnny-on-the-spot for anything the cool kids liked.

The e-mail notified all of us that, going forward, we would no longer be referring to husbands, wives, or spouses in any of our personnel forms. Going forward we could expect to see them using the term “domestic partners”. HR departments all over California were sending similar notifications about that time. Which in hindsight amounted to firing the starting pistol, launching the race that culminated in the Supreme Court Obergefell decision on gay marriage in 2015.

What irked me about the HR memo was its imposition of euphemism, combined with the essential dishonesty involved in not being open about what they were actually doing.

So naturally I decided that the HR department should be well and truly mocked, and in public if at all possible.

A friend and colleague at that company, one who was sympathetic with my innate suspicion of euphemism, joined with me and together we settled on a plan. We would commandeer the CEO’s email account, with which we would send our email blast to the entire company. It would appear to have come from the CEO, but its contents would be so obviously a parody of the recent HR email that everyone would immediately realize that it was phony.

All these many years later, I can’t really remember who hacked the email account and who wrote the email itself — the particulars have been lost in the mists of time. But the email went something very much like this:

Dear [Employee Name Here]:

It is vital for the company to stay on the absolute cutting-edge of anything the cool kids are doing in HR. 

In keeping with that priority, we will no longer be referring to anyone as employees. Henceforth, we will all be referred to as “members”.  

Consistent with the privileges that attend such a valuable "membership", there is now a $20 membership fee due and payable.

Please stop by [CEO admin's name here] desk to pay your membership fee just as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

Your HR Team

We assumed, of course, that anyone who received this email, so closely on the heels of the original, objectionable memo from HR would immediately recognize it for the parody that it was. We thought the HR team might hate us, but we weren’t crazy about them either. So that possibility didn’t really have any deterring effect at all.

Well, as things transpired, the email went off like bomb throughout the entire company. People were actually ranting — shouting — in the hallways: “I am NOT going to pay to work here!” Soooo many people were up in arms.

In the end, we weren’t fired, although it may have been a close-run thing behind closed doors. This was well before the internet or computer hacking was recognized as a thing. In those days, hackers mostly occupied themselves with the public phone system. Anyway, from our perspective we had just been playing an innocent prank. It was a very small company, and we were hard-to-find software engineers at the time. So the execs decided to kinda-sorta look the other way, after slapping us on the wrist. To this day I think the CEO was trying not to laugh out loud about it all.

When all was said and done, only the VP of Sales actually showed up at the admin’s desk and tried to pay his “membership fee”. There was something gratifying about the predictability of this, since my co-conspirator had long referred to him as “a rock with arms”. Our sales VP had never been, alas, the sharpest knife in the drawer.

This then, has been a complete and mostly faithful account of the HR wars gone by: when pranks were funny, and usually no one went to jail.