One day on a slow afternoon in my first job as the head of a labor & employee relations unit, I was sitting around the director’s office with the head of classification. Somehow, we got to talking about life-before-human-resources; what had we been doing before we got into The Business. Amazingly, it turned out that the three of us at one time or another had previously worked in a morgue. My two colleagues had worked in funeral homes and I had been a pathology research technician in a science lab. Before we began working in HR, we had each spent our days with dead bodies, them preparing the body for burial and me dissecting the parts needed for medical research (I can still remove the inner ears from a cranium in less than 12 parsecs). Over the years, I came to realize the similarities between the two fields of work: dead bodies and labor & employee relations. Both require the practitioner sometimes to do nasty thing, things we can’t talk about over dinner. Both require a high degree of mental acuity and a certain grounded-ness in practicality. And somedays after doing either, all we want to do is get home and take a bath. I’ve sometimes thought that part of the training to work in civil service law is that the initiate should participate in an autopsy. It really changes one’s view of the petty minutiae and useless bureaucracy of existence if you’ve spent a little time with a body that a few hours before had been a living breathing person, just like you and me. OK, maybe not just like me because few have had a haircut as cool as the one I had in this picture. Come to our FELTG seminars. Learn The Business without having to wear a white lab coat.
