Contractions

Best of Luck Endeavours—The Fountain – Portage Place

At one time, the department was known as “Personnel.” Then some genius came along and changed it to “Human Resources.” Personnel gives people the attribute of being a “person.” As a human resource, you are exactly what the phrase says you are: a resource. You are another resource among the list of assets within the company; you just happen to be human.

I work in a think tank. I had a colleague who transferred from our department to HR a while back. When I asked him what it was like, he described it like a bicycle wheel. Take the wheel and turn it horizontal. In our department, we were like the stem at the top, with all the spokes as conduits looking down at the rest of the organisation. In HR, it’s the same, except you’re on the bottom side—the asshole looking up at everything.

This play looks at the role of HR, one spoke at a time.

Ray Yuen