Review Review
I have quite a history with job reviews. Today's, for example. It didn't happen. In the course of 40 minutes, I heard about it, mentally prepared for it, told BossMan I was scared cause my supervisor scares me, waited around, and finally was sent home. Without being reviewed.
Reviews at Coffee Place consist of Steve rambling in generally unintelligible Engrish. And yes, I do mean Engrish. He's Korean. He has a decent vocabulary, but his syntax is broken. So that was always fun, and rarely anything more than Good work, and why doesn't anyone listen to me?
At The School, I never received a review as a librarian. Just as well. I was a wreck that year, and Mrs. Principal hated me. When I was teaching, Mr. VP observed me twice, and both observations went well. One of them involved a beanie lizard, but that's better than my friend's which involved a live lizard. But two good observations and a contract offer didn't prevent me from being shuffled off to the library with the claim that there'd only be one 6th grade the next year. It didn't prevent me from having to sign a new contract that summer saying I'd be librarian so they could hire a new 6th grade teacher in the three weeks I was out of the country.
The other school kept me as a sub/librarian/electives teacher for three years. I watched 5 English teacher openings at the 6th-8th grade level come and go. I watched them hire youth ministers and art majors over the linguist/writer/grammar freak who was regularly recommended by the outgoing teachers. Why? Because I hadn't ever been observed. They kept saying they would. They never did. Finally, the decision was made that I would never have a classroom there. Based on zero observations.
Before that was a restaurant. The only times I ever got feedback from supervisors there were the time Jen called me insubordinate because I forgot to do something, and when Joe told me that my personality grated on some of the servers.
The person who ended up supervising me at my last office job was a real gem. She decided that if my computer crashed (a frequent occurrence on Windows 98), I had to inform her and inform Craig the tech guy before doing anything else. In that order. I got in trouble if I just rebooted my computer without going through both of them first. Problem was, it happened at least once a week when one of them was at lunch, and I had to wait. Just so Craig could literally read the error message (which was always the Blue Screen of Death) and tell me to reboot. That supervisor eventually pulled me into the conference room and told me I wasn't "producing enough." Oh, whatever, Crazy Woman.
But my favorite of all was my library job at Greenville. I was there fall semester and interterm of '97 and '98. In January of '98, I got strep throat. It was bad. I was out of commission for a week. Now, toward the beginning of that week, I called in sick. The other worker on my shift was very pregnant. I was really sick. I was not going to expose her to whatever nasty bug I had. The head librarian took exception to this way of thinking. She decided I should resign my library job. My only review was the one where she made this "suggestion."
Gee. The nervousness today makes a little more sense now.
Reviews at Coffee Place consist of Steve rambling in generally unintelligible Engrish. And yes, I do mean Engrish. He's Korean. He has a decent vocabulary, but his syntax is broken. So that was always fun, and rarely anything more than Good work, and why doesn't anyone listen to me?
At The School, I never received a review as a librarian. Just as well. I was a wreck that year, and Mrs. Principal hated me. When I was teaching, Mr. VP observed me twice, and both observations went well. One of them involved a beanie lizard, but that's better than my friend's which involved a live lizard. But two good observations and a contract offer didn't prevent me from being shuffled off to the library with the claim that there'd only be one 6th grade the next year. It didn't prevent me from having to sign a new contract that summer saying I'd be librarian so they could hire a new 6th grade teacher in the three weeks I was out of the country.
The other school kept me as a sub/librarian/electives teacher for three years. I watched 5 English teacher openings at the 6th-8th grade level come and go. I watched them hire youth ministers and art majors over the linguist/writer/grammar freak who was regularly recommended by the outgoing teachers. Why? Because I hadn't ever been observed. They kept saying they would. They never did. Finally, the decision was made that I would never have a classroom there. Based on zero observations.
Before that was a restaurant. The only times I ever got feedback from supervisors there were the time Jen called me insubordinate because I forgot to do something, and when Joe told me that my personality grated on some of the servers.
The person who ended up supervising me at my last office job was a real gem. She decided that if my computer crashed (a frequent occurrence on Windows 98), I had to inform her and inform Craig the tech guy before doing anything else. In that order. I got in trouble if I just rebooted my computer without going through both of them first. Problem was, it happened at least once a week when one of them was at lunch, and I had to wait. Just so Craig could literally read the error message (which was always the Blue Screen of Death) and tell me to reboot. That supervisor eventually pulled me into the conference room and told me I wasn't "producing enough." Oh, whatever, Crazy Woman.
But my favorite of all was my library job at Greenville. I was there fall semester and interterm of '97 and '98. In January of '98, I got strep throat. It was bad. I was out of commission for a week. Now, toward the beginning of that week, I called in sick. The other worker on my shift was very pregnant. I was really sick. I was not going to expose her to whatever nasty bug I had. The head librarian took exception to this way of thinking. She decided I should resign my library job. My only review was the one where she made this "suggestion."
Gee. The nervousness today makes a little more sense now.
Labels: Work
posted by The Other Gatekeeper at
8:20 PM
4 Comments:
Take heart. My last review turned into a two hour screaming match, in which I called my boss (and business owner) an "over-grown two-year-old" and finally informed him that my review was over and that he could go "f*ck himself." After a two week period of not speaking to me, he finally offered me as close to an apology as I'll ever get AND (more importantly) a big fat bonus check. I figure if he has one more toddler-esque meltdown, I'll probably have enough money to walk out and begin working in direct competition with him. Not the best of situations, of course, but its always good to find a silver lining.
holy crap!
Wow! I just took a page from Scout's playbook and told my boss to go "F" himself... And he fired me!
Just joking... Find a happy place!
Well, I'll admit its probably a big mistake to tell your boss to go "f*ck himself" when your boss is god. But as it stands, my boss isn't god. He likes to think he is sometimes, which is why its a good thing I'm around to tell him otherwise. And, fortunately, I happen to be in a line of work where being argumentative and confrontational are positive attributes.
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