Performance anxiety

WTF is up with “performance reviews” that require the employee to rate his/her performance before the manager does? Feels like the Struggle Sessions brought to you by those merry folk of the Cultural Revolution, where you’re meant to confess to crimes real or imaginary.

This was the result of our (now thankfully gone) HR director spending many thousands of dollars on consultants in an attempt to “professionalize” her department’s functions, and make it look like they add value. We were meant to meet with our managers at least quarterly to check in on our performance against goals. Guess how often that actually happened?

That’s right: exactly never.

So now I’m supposed to dredge up my last year’s goals and measure my performance against them. Then, I suppose, meet with my (now ex-) manager to go through them, and get his take. Deep joy. And then meet with my new manager to get my goals for 2018. Which is going to be a slice since 1)I’m only funded through June and 2)I still haven’t seen a job description.

Also, the instructions from HR say managers are to “provide the staff you supervise with the…review form” no later than 9 February. Guess when my ex-manager sent it to me.

That’s right: yesterday.

Seen about town

Adding to my collection of interesting vanity plates:

Stormy weather

The good news is that we’ve got a couple of days with temperatures in the 70s. Plants are going to go nuts rushing out into the springlike air.

The bad—the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad—news is that last week I somehow managed to nuke a document that had a day’s worth of work on the value proposition and mission statement for my project. It is gone, and nothing (not trawling through the Recycle Bin, not doing a search on *.WBK and *.DOCX, not manually going through my desktop and my Dropbox) will bring it back. So I have to start over again.

Oh. And I forgot to set the alarm last night, so I overslept by an hour this morning. Don’t even talk to me about the weather.

Butterflies in the snow

We here in the District They Call Columbia had a smattering of snow on Saturday. It wasn’t really more than a dusting, at least where I was, just enough to make the cardinals look even more splashy than usual in my garden; by Sunday afternoon it had all but completely melted

But there was enough to spoof the solar cells on the LED butterfly lights I have out there, so that they went through their color-changing paces in the (admittedly thin) daylight.

It’s a little hard to see in the video, but I thought it was entertaining.

Gratitude Monday: return visit

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the brown bunny that has been wont to trot across my back yard of a morning or afternoon (one direction in the ack-emma, the reverse in the pip-emma). Last sighting was sometime in the Fall—actually, in the dark, early one morning on my way to work, at first a flash of iridescent eyes in my headlights, then a shadow flitting into the shrubs.

It’s been a very cold winter, and I was a little concerned. This bunny is not the Peter Cottontail version, all plump curves. No, this is the lean-and-hungry Cassius rabbit. Viz. this video of him enjoying a bit of apple from last year:

So you’ll understand that I’ve been worried that the little lagomorph might not have enough inner resources to make it through the waterpipe-freezingly cold months.

Imagine, then, my surprise and happiness yesterday afternoon, when I looked up from some writing and saw my brown buddy nosing about some apple peels I’d tossed out before it snowed on Saturday. (Listen—used coffee grounds, vegetable parings, peels—they’re part of my proto-attempt at amending soil that doesn’t appear to have been touched since the Pleistocene Era.)

He made it through the winter, and even looks a little curvy.

And that’s what I’m grateful for today.