This One Time, Boss Gave me a Performance Review...

About a year ago, Boss (who had been my boss for all of four months at the time) had to give all of his direct reports a mid-year performance review. The whole concept of a review was completely absurd, considering Prison Media had been on a salary freeze for nearly half a decade. So, what's the point of a review if a salary increase isn't attached to work performance? But anyway, Boss scheduled a meeting to discuss my review and I went in thinking it would have to be good, as I'd been performing miracles for the last quarter. Well, wouldn't you know, Boss surprised me once again. While overall, my review was above average, he totally docked me in one area: Attitude.

Now, am I saying that I deserved an Attitude Gold Medal? Absolutely not. But, here's what's interesting: In the four months that Boss had been my boss, we had very little contact. There were emails, sure, but in-person conversations and phone conversations could be counted on one hand. Combined. And one of those was the pneumonia disaster, so that doesn't really count. And yet, based on those limited encounters, he managed to come up with this:

"While Kate does excellent work and is very efficient, I think she would be even more effective if she could be more positive in her attitude and comments in general."

I'm quite certain that I had never given Boss any indication of what I really thought about anything. So I was perplexed. When I asked him exactly what he was talking about, he couldn't come up with any specific examples, conversations, etc. I kept pressing him, and he came up with this gem:

Boss: "Well, someone told me they overheard you saying something negative about corporate."

Me: "What?! That's ridiculous. That would be hearsay and you can't put hearsay in my review. You heard something third-hand and you're calling it fact? You don't know what the context of the conversation was and if you didn't hear it directly, you can't dock me for it. You need to revise that section."

Boss: "I'm leaving it in there."

Me: "Well, then I'm not signing it because I don't agree with it. You can't use office gossip in my review."

Boss: "Well, that's your choice. It's really not that big of a deal. I'm sure we'll look back on this during your 2010 review and laugh!"

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Well, it's almost time for my 2010 review and I'm not laughing. That's not entirely true. I'm laughing for completely different reasons. I'm wondering if Boss will give performance reviews to the job stealers in India. Mainly, I find it utterly unbelievable that Boss knew at that time that there wouldn't be a 2010 review, and yet, he still wanted to stick it to me. In looking at my review, the goals and objectives are especially laughable. They're completely fictitious. Boss should have earned an A+ in creative writing for putting together this phony list of objectives. A couple of examples:

Future Objectives

Add to Skills: "I'd like to see Kate add to her production skills by working on and learning about other areas of the business such as video/audio editing."

Oops, he forgot to include blogging. Objective met.

Production Training for Team: "I'd like to see Kate take on the responsibility of training other members of the team who have taken on production responsibilities so their skills grow faster than they otherwise would."

Funny how this suddenly takes on a whole new meaning in light of everything that happened late last year. I'll have to say, with just a touch of sarcasm, it's a damn shame that objective wasn't met. But it kind of makes me wonder if he was laying the groundwork for the India Project.

On a positive note, under Quality of Work, Boss says: "Kate is extremely conscious of the quality of her work and turns in very high-quality finished products."

I'm gonna go way out on a limb and guess that the same can't be said about Prison Media's new buddies in Calcutta!