Mickey Spillane died this week
I loved Mike Hammer. In honor of Mickey, I present to you: my FY 2007 performance review self-assessment.
(Suggested reading environment: puffing on a cheap cigar while drinking a dark beer.)
I stubbed my cigarette out into the overflowing ashtray carefully. If I spill it, I’ve gotta empty it; if I don’t, I can procratinate all the longer. Taking another pull on the scalding coffee cup (who in their right mind drinks coffee in the summertime? Oh, wait.) I put bits to paper and begin to churn. Boss gave me the task of writing a self-evaluation. I really hate self-evaluations, because there’s only so much bullshit I can stand in one day, and it’s all the worse if I’m the one writing it.
The memories are cold, like the wind that cuts through you on a winter day. Chills you to the bone. That kind of cold that makes you wonder if a thousand cold showers will ever make you warm again. Still, I’d made this bed, and even though I didn’t have anybody warm to share it with it was mine nonetheless. Customer satisfaction was the theme of the day, and even though I was apparently good at it, I still didn’t quite know why. Customers were usually imbeciles; the kind of knuckle-dragging weirdos that made one long for the days of arrows and spears, oh to be a gladiator on an ancient field so I could mow them down like the swine they are.
I snap back to reality. Focus, mav. Only have a few hours until your head’s on the block.
Right. Customer satisfaction. “Make the customer happy, and don’t give the farm away,” says the man who never takes phone calls. Sure, it sounds easy, but that’s assuming that the customer is reasonable. I can count those guys on one hand. Customers ask for the damnedest things. They don’t ask for reasonable. If they did, I wouldn’t be employed as a software tech for a hardware manufacturer.
My attitude? My attitude sucks. Well, not really. “I yam what I yam,” said Popeye, and rarely were truer words ever spoken. I could glue a happy face on myself every day; advertise my fakeness like a neon sign. “FAKE!” “FAKE!” it’d cry into the flourescent glare of the call center, “HE’S A FRAUD!” “HE HATES YOUR GUTS, BUT HIS BOSS WON’T LET HIM TELL YOU THAT!” it would scream. I could bask in its glow like a sun; warming me with its hate rays I could put on the happy face and pretend I’m happy to be here every day, a cheery little june bug just waiting to make the people happy. Or I could be honest. Here’s a hint for those playing at home: corporations don’t like honesty. It’s death.
My coffee’s getting cold. I pour myself another refill, slowly. These days, even that seems futile. It’s like life’s had a dark shroud pulled over it, and I’m just waiting for someone to lift it away. Or maybe it’ll smother me.
That’s it. One more to go and this will all be over. We’re in the home stretch now, buddy. Just keep running and forget about that guy right behind you, who’s trying just as hard to tackle you as you are to run away.
Do I grow as a person? Not really. My company, whether they understand it or not, doesn’t really allow for that. So you’re a person who hates musicals. And they say “Hey, we’ll give you this job reviewing musicals, or you can keep your old job stacking shit.” You take the job about musicals. Why? Because your old job was STACKING SHIT. You’re perfectly happy reviewing musicals as long as they don’t make you stack any more shit. Then they tell you that as a condition of your musical reviewing job you need to write a musical. And part of you wants to write an action movie, or a drama, or a Great American Novel and when they come looking for their musical to tell them to go fucking pound sand. But you don’t, because you made a promise that you would write them a goddamned musical. You can train the dolphin to jump through the hoops, but to use that as a measure of satisfaction in insanity in its purest form.
My blood’s fighting back for control of my caffeine stream. Gotta crank this out while I still have it in me.
One of these days I’m gonna get the call - the one where the fuckstick running SBS 4.5 is trying to migrate to 2003 and has no backups and wants to make sure that there is absolutely no possibility of data loss - oh, and he probably won’t know what a CD is, and have 50 users to recreate, and be migrating from Exchange 5.5 at the same time. And he needs to do it in less than 5 hours or his boss will fire him. And my brain will melt. They’ll find me sitting under my desk sobbing, rocking back and forth and chanting my extension softly to myself. This is my fate. This is what I have chosen. Someone kill me now, please just fucking end it, shoot me in the head or stab me in the temple or karate chop my head clean off my body, just don’t let me suffer alone, chanting my extension endlessly, locked in a room in Blackfoot.