Honesty is difficult on a self-evaluation form

Can’t believe it’s been a year since I started what I continue to think of as my “new” job. I’m still loving every minute of it. Most days, I actually look forward to getting to the office.

Sure, I’d rather be fishing. Or having hot wings and domestic beer at a sports bar. Or even sitting in my back yard watching the geese fly onto the lake. But as both Ecclesiastes and The Byrds have noted, to everything, there is a season.

If one must work, it should be at a job one loves.

Still, every so often I’m charged with a task I’d rather avoid. This happened last week, when the managing editor sent me the dreaded one-year “self-evaluation review” form.

I hate these things. 

I’m basically an honest person. Yes, really. But when faced with a self-evaluation form — one which might one day be a determining factor in future raises or even employment — I’m tempted to lie like Satan in the Garden of Eden.

Then I worry … what if the form is meant to determine whether I’m honest? Won’t all that lying just confirm what management must already suspect? But maybe a willingness to lie just to hang on to my job is exactly the sort of “go get ‘em” attitude the boss is looking for.

There’s no way to know for sure.

Still, when faced with one of these things, I usually just tell the truth and hope for the best.

This is probably not a brilliant strategy; but I am not a brilliant guy (though I typically say I am on self-evaluation forms).

Some of the questions are easy, like: “How knowledgeable is the employee of the principal areas of their position?” I assume this means, do I know how to check my voice mail and write an article.

The answer, happily, is yes. Yes, I DO know how to do these things.

However, when answering the next question: “How knowledgeable is the employee of operations and/or practices in other areas of the company?” all I can come up with is, “There are other areas? Who knew?”

I’m guessing this is not the response they’re looking for. But honestly, as long as the paper gets printed, the website gets webbed, the Facebook page gets faced, the Twitter account gets twitted and payroll manages to locate me on payday, how much do I need to know about these other departments?

The next section of the form deals with judgment and whether mine is the good kind. Do I show good judgment? I have four ex-wives. What do you think?

Then there’s the section that wants to know how decisive I am. I can’t even decide whether to lie on the self-evaluation form. Again, the answer seems self-evident.

The form also asks how I manage “delegation of duties.” I think they’re asking how often I try to push my work off on others. The answer is: Always. Sadly, my coworkers are generally too smart to allow this to happen.

Then there’s all the baloney about “cooperation” and “teamwork” and “conscientiousness” and so on. Basically, all the stuff I had to lie about a year ago to get the job in the first place.

Finally, at the end of the questionnaire there’s a formula for figuring your overall rating. The instructions read as follows: “Following the completion of all the ratings in section II, the manager should total the ratings and divide that total by the number of items rated. This becomes the Outputs Score. This score is then weighted by a factor of 7, for the Section Summary Rating.”

If I had 100 years and unlimited access to a Cray supercomputer, I still couldn’t figure this out. As I’ve mentioned here before, I hate math, and frankly, this formula sounds suspiciously like a “story problem,” which as you probably know, is all they have on the shelves of the library in Hell.

At any rate, on the actual evaluation form I did my best to be honest and I hope that doesn’t cost me my job. I really like it here. My coworkers rock, the boss is nice and the work is genuinely interesting.

I would hate to get canned. 

After being a respected columnist, there’s no way I could go back to stripping.

Mike’s book, “Looking at the Pint Half Full” is available at Robbins Book List in Greenville and in eBook format at Amazon.com. Contact Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com or from his blog at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.

Sometimes, my job just isn't manly enough

I'm beginning to think I'm in the wrong line of work.  And not just because this is, from an economic standpoint, the worst time to be a writer since that first semi-literate Neanderthal hammered out a primitive hieroglyph on the rough-hewn wall of his cave.*  Being a writer has never been a lucrative profession unless your last name is Koontz or King.  My own last name doesn't seem to generate quite that much buzz at the Barnes & Noble checkout counter.

But that's OK.  Like I said, most writers, myself included, aren't really in this for the big paycheck.  At one time I was in it for the girls, but that was back in college, when any guy who could put two sentences together and knew what "iambic pentameter" meant was thought by most coeds to be "sensitive" and "soulful."  In truth, writers are no more soulful or sensitive than your average plumber; we're just better at faking it.

That goes double for poets.

Don't get me wrong, I like writing just fine.  And from time to time, it even pays the bills.

But every so often I hear something, some errant comment, that makes me think I might be happier in some other profession.  This happened the other night while SweetAnnie and I were having burgers and beer at Grattan Irish Pub.

It was the first time we'd been there and I was really digging the authentic pub atmosphere, the pint and the burger.  As usual, Annie and I had our Scrabble tiles laid out in front of us.  She was an English major and we both like word games with our beer and burgers.

Annie was sporting a pale, pink cardigan and I had on my corduroy blazer, khakis and old brown loafers.  In short, we couldn't have looked more like a couple ex-academic word nerds if we'd tried.  Happily, the pub is a friendly place where tool-and-die workers don't threaten to kick your butt just because you'd rather play Scrabble than watch Nascar, which is what everyone else in the joint was doing.

I was halfway through my burger and losing badly at Scrabble (as I so often do), when it happened.  A few guys sitting at the bar had been griping about their respective jobs when one said, "I bid on the steel, but didn't get it."

I'm not sure what that even means, exactly, but it sounded incredibly manly.

I bid on the steel.  I bid on the steel.  I bid on the steel.

I've never said anything that cool in my entire life!  That one statement conjures up images of beefy dudes in plaid shirts riding construction elevators to the tops of girder-strewn construction sites, dented lunch-boxes gripped tightly in calloused hands.  It speaks of fresh air, of welding sparks tinged with the electric perfume of ozone, of catcalls aimed at passing secretaries, of red-faced foremen and worn, leather gloves.

"I bid on the steel" is a siren call to male office rats everywhere!  A call to vacate the cubicle, grab a hammer, put on some steel-toed boots!

But here I sit in my basement office writing about it instead.  (This is a family newspaper, so if you'd like to read the expletive I'm thinking of here, you'll have to write it in yourself.)

Sigh.

Think I'll go sort out my toolbox and see if there's anything around the house that needs a nail pounded into it.

*And yes, I know Neanderthal man never used hieroglyphs on his cave wall or anywhere else. I'm just using artistic license here.  OK, so maybe I'm too lazy to research the thing. What can I say?  I was on deadline.

Mike Taylor's new book, Looking at the Pint Half Full, is available in both paperback and eBook version at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com, amazon.com.  The eBook version also is available from Barnes & Noble Booksellers.  Email Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.