An Experiment in Scotch

Does that lit­tle jin­gle make you think Christ­mas? Well stop it, it’s not what I’m talk­ing about. Hal­loween nei­ther even though it’s a great lit­tle hol­i­day. No, I’m talk­ing about review time. That time dur­ing the year when the review fairy comes down from on high where she’s been hang­ing out with Jesus and John Lennon and other peo­ple too cool to talk to you and brings her mag­nan­i­mous 2.76% raises to bestow on all the lit­tle peo­ple, if they were good this year.

Like Santa, the review fairy has ways to know whether you’ve been naughty or nice. One of the ways is called “The Self Review”. It sounds impor­tant but really all it is is a way to take your balls and put them in a vice and give you the oppor­tu­nity to tighten the screws. See, I told you she was mag­nan­i­mous. Three things can hap­pen with self-reviews and like throw­ing a pass in the NFL, two of them are bad. Those two things are you’re hon­est and you tell your over­lords about all the inter­net you surf at work which then results in you get­ting a bad review or you totally over­sell your­self and the over­lords fig­ure that you’re a self-promoting prick with an agenda.

In the end, it shouldn’t be my damn job to review myself. They are bloody well pay­ing my boss to know what I do every day (trust me, he drops by enough that he should). The Self Review is a ridicu­lous piece of HR double-speak so that the Man can find new ways to screw you. In the­ory, it sounds like a great plan but like just like social­ism, that never works out when you give the keys to the cas­tle to the idiots.

On my Self Review this year, there are 4 places to review your­self plus the option to upload a doc­u­ment. What kind of ass-kiss has time in the day to write another com­pletely sep­a­rate doc­u­ment about his strengths and weak­ness and upload it into the sys­tem? Any­way, the four areas of review are “Accom­plish­ment Sum­mary”, “Key Strengths”, “Devel­op­ment Needs and Plans”, and “Job/Career Inter­ests”. Each of these areas have lit­tle help but­tons that you can click to explain them in more detail, you know just in case “Accom­plish­ment Sum­mary” wasn’t clear enough. For exam­ple, that one has the fol­low­ing detail: “Sum­ma­rize your accom­plish­ments in the past year, includ­ing misses. (No more than 10)” I think I’ll write “I’ve never had 10 misses in one year, not even in col­lege and now that I’m mar­ried, the chances of that ever hap­pen­ing have dwin­dled.” Won­der if the review fairy would like that.

Key Strengths helps with “Describe your strengths and how they have changed in the past year. (3 to 5)”. I think I may Bart this one and do “I AM NOT AN FDIC INSURED ESTABLISHMENT” 5 times. Or maybe I talk about how at the begin­ning of the year I could only bench 185 but now I can do 210. Or maybe do a dis­course on the dif­fer­ences in the Islay malts. That one would prob­a­bly get me an extra .04 tacked on to that raise.

Devel­op­ment Needs and Plans helps with “Iden­tify the most crit­i­cal needs and respon­sive action plans. Describe oppor­tu­ni­ties to broaden/expand cur­rent job. (2 to 3)”. Um, the most crit­i­cal needs are a quiet place to work and not hav­ing to buy my own extra mon­i­tor, video card and copy of Resharper. I have no idea what a crit­i­cal respon­sive action plan is but if I fig­ure it out, I’ll put it in here. In real­ity, isn’t “respon­sive action plan” an oxy­moron? By def­i­n­i­tion, shouldn’t an action plan be about proac­tive behav­ior and not respon­sive behav­ior? Isn’t a lit­tle “horses have left the barn” to come up with an action plan to respond to things that already happened?

Over­all, the self review is good for one thing and that’s being the punch line of a Dil­bert strip. I have until Novem­ber 10th to do it and I’m going to put it off as long as pos­si­ble so that I keep my options open on exactly how to fill it out.