Life Handed Us a Pay Check, We Said "We Worked Harder Than THIS!"

So it’s yearly evaluation time at work - egads.

I truly dislike the personal evaluation portion of this assignment, because I always found it quite daunting to sit there and try and hype/sell yourself to the people that hired you based on a position they created in the first place.

The trick, I have decided, is to accentuate your responsibilities and accomplishments just enough so you don’t sound too arrogant on the one hand or completely fed up and disgruntled on the other.

It’s a fine line friends.

Over the years, I’ve mastered the overuse of adjectives and subtle self praise to accomplish just this.
And so far it has worked.

This year however, my company has decided to impose a new procedure.
Basically, you get sent an email from your boss asking you to reference the names of all the people you’ve worked with over the past year so they can contact them and give their opinion of your “work”.
Which really translates into their personal opinion of you. A popularity contest of sorts.

I think this is kind of effed.

There are many people we have to work with day in and day out that may or may not like us personally.
Do you think that the average Joe office worker that doesn’t like you personally for whatever reason will distinguish between their feelings about you as a person and the quality of your work? My guess is prolly not.
What a chance this is for them to get their kicks in, right? They get to contribute to the decision about your raise!

Not liking this idea much at all.

Also, we must now fill out our “responsibilities”.

Wait. What?

Are the people evaluating us - in this case, the department heads - not supposed to tell us what our job responsibilities are?
Are they not the department heads in the first place because they’ve mastered every facet of the job we now perform?
Makes no sense.

I was mulling this over as I stared blankly at my portion of the performance evaluation form, and suddenly realized what’s really going on here.

I’ve theorized that the reason we are asked to fill out our responsibilities is because the people in charge - the people that are supposed to mentor and lead us in our job development - HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WE DO EVERY DAY.

So, they disguise this fact in a tricky little self-evaluation form that we must fill out ourselves.
They then read over our responsibilities as we’ve listed before the face to face evaluation, call us in for the official chat, and regurgitate what we ourselves wrote in mang-lish (manager speak) so it sounds to us like they really do know the complete ins and outs of our efforts every day.

How clever!

Seriously.

Ahem. Hmm.
Anyways, back to filling out my self-evaluation…