Annual appraisal day at work today, and it went fine. I complain about my day job a lot, but I'm good at it, and people still seem to think I'm good at it if I literally spend half the working day asleep and still get everything I need to do done. So who am I to argue?
I feel mildly guilty. Not enough to really want to push myself in the daily grind — there isn't really much to "push myself" with, which is part of the problem, really — but enough that I was stressing myself out a bit about this appraisal just in case anyone "noticed" (I don't know how they would have) that I had been tired, bored, disillusioned and prone to sleeping through entire conference calls. Then I thought, well, if they don't want me to sleep through conference calls, they shouldn't have so many of the fucking things, should they? And they shouldn't be so fucking boring.
I always feel the "self-appraisal" aspect of yearly appraisals is kind of pointless. Who in their right mind is going to rate themselves anything other than "satisfactory"? Give yourself top marks and you set yourself up for a fall — or just look like an arrogant asshole. Give yourself anything below the satisfactory mark and you're just asking for trouble. Unless, of course, you like the idea of increased scrutiny, in which case go nuts, I guess.
It reminds me of one of my least favourite bits of secondary school — the periods towards the end of term where we had to write our "profiles" that would end up in our reports. Inevitably, it would consist of an entire hour of a whole class bored to tears writing "This term, I have learned [all the things we have learned]" in our neatest handwriting and hoping it went through the carbon copy paper properly. That or hoping that no-one scratched an "invisible" cock on our top sheet when we weren't looking, only for it to become terrifyingly clear on both the teacher's and the parent's carbon copies beneath.
Okay, maybe there's no covert dick-drawing in the adult workplace — or if there is, I'm almost certainly working somewhere far too boring for any of that to go on — but the whole "insincere attempt to look like we're self-reflecting" thing remains the same, and I'm never sure what it actually achieves other than leaving a paper trail to say why everyone's salaries went up at a fraction of a percent of the rate of inflation this year. Or something.
Anyway. Nothing to worry about now for another year. I am, apparently, Doing a Good Job. I'll take it.
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