It's All About Me

It's all about me, although I don't want it to be.  I just slogged through the company's performance self-appraisal, where you get to wax eloquent about how great you are.

It's a process that I despise, trying to fit my "real" job into these artificially crafted categories and company goals developed by some corporate wonk that's too far removed from day to day operations to be relevant.

Goals? How about: I wore pants. Everyday.  Everyone's grateful for that one; that's gotta be worth a couple hundred bucks in the old paycheck, yes?

If you don't play the game and fill out the paperwork, you don't get a raise. Period. Talk about leverage. I'm allergic to paperwork and will go miles out of my way to avoid it.  My usual excuse is "I'm an IT geek. I don't actually know how to read."

Several years ago, I developed a system to defend myself against this yearly dread. I simply wrote down in my ledger what I did that day. That way I could refer back to it when it was review time. I've always preferred to let my work speak for itself, so I try to work hard and produce good results. Rather than try to come up with wonderful and vague generalizations about my year, I simply copy stuff from my ledger. I usually get comments from the higher-ups on how detailed my review was and how well I backed up my case.

It's because I'm lazy, believe me.

Now, just to make my life hard, I'm getting calls from the Corporate proposal team, who want to use my resume to win new work for the company. That's how I ended up going back downtown last year. They used my name on the proposal and promised I wouldn't have to be on that contract -- and then bid me as a key individual and were shocked when they won -- and I had to go work it. I've spent the last six months working to find my way back to the office near home. Yo, boss: anybody see a pregnant lady with 5 other kids in my house?!

They can't just use my resume and leave it at that, can they? Oh, no. Now these proposals require that you map your experience to yet another set of arbitrary categories and requirements. Are they going to read my resume and do all that for me? No sir. It falls back in my lap. Would I mind reading these position descriptions and filling in the relevant experience in the highlighted blocks? Yes, as a matter of fact, I would -- it's paperwork. 

Grumble, grumble.