The postmodernists said there is no reality. That's because the postmodernists had a dual reporting relationship with employee communications and HR.

Since time out of mind, communicators have complained about HR people: They're narrow-minded technocrats much more interested in covering the company's ass (and their own asses) than in moving information and insight around the organization to for the good of the culture.

The surest way to get the heads nodding in any audience of employee communicators is to declare, "HR people just don't get it."

Well I found myself at a fancy Italian restaurant on Saturday night with a half-dozen women, all chummy colleagues at a Fortune 100 company. They had gathered for a weekend of fun in Chicago. (One of them is a family member, which is how I got the invitation.)

They're all in HR and they're from all over the U.S.

I don't like spending tons of money on Italian food—I like spending tons of money on golf—so I felt compelled to write this dinner off by making it a market-research exercise.

I asked the HR folks how many of them had close and regular dealings with employee communicators. All the hands went up.

I asked them, one by one, to describe the difference between HR and employee communications. What's the typical role of each?

The basic answer: We do employee relations, and employee communicators write about what we do.

At this, one laughed. "We usually have to do the writing, too," she said. Why? Because employee communicators are too lazy and mentally weak even to read the HR policies closely enough to write intelligently about them.

Well then, why would companies hire employee internal communicators at all? For their technical expertise—they're the ones who know the password to post stuff on the intranet—and for their ability to spin employee relations reality into palatable internal public relations.

"We just want to say stuff," said one HR woman. "But you can't just say stuff." The employee communicators "soften" the hard reality of HR policies. And often they don't even do that very well. "Mostly what they do is add semi-colons to my writing," one woman said with a chuckle.

In short: These HR women told me at this fancy Italian dinner that they're the gin and tonic and we're the lime, they're the spaghetti and we're the bay leaf, they're the brains and hands and we're the lipstick, often overapplied.

Meanwhile, we think we're the princes and HR people are the frogs, we're the music and they're the static, we're the light and they're the bushel.

And meanwhile, as I said while these six HR women and one employee communication pundit spent 20 minutes trying to tally up the restaurant bill, "Somewhere a CFO is laughing."