If you are an HR professional in Illinois, here is a heads up. While you are comfortable dealing with employees who are Illini, you may soon be confronted by employees who are ETs!
Some of your employees may not have self-identified themselves as Klingons! And you may be translating your training sessions and handbooks into their language really soon.
Well, the Illinois Department of Employment Security must think there are a lot of Klingons employed in the state, because the Chicago Tribune discovered that the IDES website now has an option for reading in the site in the extraterrestrial language.
So to help an employee or to just express your inner Trekkie, just go to http://www.ides.illinois.gov and click on the red box in the upper right-hand corner to select Klingon as the language to view. The other options are Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Polish, Russian—and Maltese!
Luckily, there is a Klingon Glossary available at www.kli.org/tlh/phrases.html. And if you want to trade pleasantries with your Klingon workers, you can go to the Everyday Klingon phrases website at www.kli.org/tlh/phrases.html, where “Hello” is “nuqneH.”
How has the IDES explained this? At time when the state government is under siege and budgets have been slashed, this seems like a poor use of resources, even if the intention was light-hearted.