Understanding HR and Food Poisoning

Don't drink the water.
Keep your hands away from your face.
Check the expiration date on your food.
Don't touch anything in the bus station, including anywhere inside the bus.

Even if you do all of these things, it doesn't guarantee success in avoiding invading bacteria.

Not to get unnecessarily graphic, but two weekends ago I was in New York City. All was going well for us. However I tempted fate too many times:
We rode the bus up from Philadelphia;
I ate packaged food without checking expiration dates;
After getting sunburned, I applied sunscreen without washing my hands and face first;
I dropped a contact lens on the hotel bathroom floor and later questioned how well I cleaned it; and
I bought a bottle of water from some hole-in-the-wall market without examining the bottle.

Drinking the bottle of water was the last thing I remember doing before feeling the first pangs of illness. It may have been the source. Yet with food poisoning, it is so hard to trace its origins. I definitely know that it was not the mimosas that I drank later. Though it was to their misfortune that they never fully digested and exited me in a unconventional manner twelve hours later.

As with most cases of evil bacterial invasions, the body eventually recovers. A couple of days of dieting on soda crackers, apple sauce and warm ginger ale usually does the trick for me. This time around I did recover in a few days. However I still had a lingering stomach ache all week.

During the past week, I thought I could have used more common sense in New York. I also kept theorizing as to how it happened. Every theory though ends as just that, a theory. For all my stupid moves, there is no way of even knowing if I could have prevented it from happening. Moreover, since I didn't land in a hospital and I'm feeling better now, there is little point in investing any more thought to it.

However, I am thinking about how cranky our cruddy economy and jobless rate is making people. I read articles like this one on HR Advice written by Meredith Soleau and the subsequent comments it generated and I realize searching for a job for some people is like avoiding food poisoning.

You search for resources that are clean. You try to use common sense. But when in a foreign land, it can be difficult to always know what that means. You try to make the right moves that will result in positive outcomes. Still not all outcomes will have a positive experience and it remains a mystery as to why.

That mystery bothers me lately. It bothers me that I think too many people don't understand the recruiting process, let alone their HR departments or HR period. For those people HR is like some bacteria. It's everywhere, inside and out. Some are good. Some are bad. It exists on another plane of existance. And it's highly unpredictable.

I'd like to believe there is an easy solution that could sweep away all bad HR and could reassure everyone of the benefits of good HR. But even something like antibiotics and anti-bacterial soap is indiscriminate and kills all bacteria.

I know that I've not identified what 'bad' HR is. Simply if it crosses your path, it makes you sick.

Hopefully one day there will be a cure. Until that day, the best thing to do for everyone outside of HR is to use common sense; don't stick dirty fingers in your eye and watch what you eat. For everyone in HR, we must give as much as possible to research and development and pray someday there is a vaccine.