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Phonemail was waiting for me when I got back into town from my newspaper design class. It was M. from The Company's human resources department, asking me to call her back regarding my request, placed through the company's intranet weeks ago, to change my ethnicity from "Asian/Pacific Islander" to "no answer" or "other" or whatever non-specific option they're calling it these days.
M.'s message explained that HR has been instructed by corporate not to change the "ethnicity code" to N/A until after all of the options have been spelled out to the employee one by one. Only after I've heard all of the options and still don't think any are a "good fit," she said, are they allowed to change the code.
Dear God. I really am just a number and a piece of census data to some bean counter in an office tower, aren't I.
I called M. back, and she said she hadn't heard from me in so long (I was out of town), she had followed up by sending me an e-mail listing and detailing each of the company's ethnicity codes. She explained that corporate uses the same ethnicity codes as the government. They're woefully archaic, and I hadn't been the first person to complain about the rigid, compartmentalized, black-and-white (no pun intended) delineations. HR is working on "updating" them (for lack of a better word) to reflect the changing population and to be more sensitive to people of mixed race. To her credit, she was very nice, and I know M. was just following orders.
But in the meantime, she asked me one more time to look at the options, and if I still didn't feel as though I could comfortably choose, she would go ahead and change my ethnicity code to N/A.
She said something about if an employee's ethnicity code is listed in the company's system as N/A, it would be an "outstanding issue," but I didn't catch it all. That concerns me a little. I got the impression that they would hit me up again in the future to choose one.
At any rate, I answered the e-mail. Here is the response.
Replies: 1 shoutout
I must ask, where was Q during all of this?
Posted by Richard @ 03/29/2003 11:17 AM EST