Appraisal Season
It’s moving up to appraisal season up here. This happens, naturally enough, just before Christmas, with the results coming in the New Year; meaning that Christmas, which is amongst our busiest periods already, is our most stressful one.
There is a certain kind of person who believes this relieves the stress: That the results are in and we don’t need to worry so much until the results come out, that nothing we can do will affect the results. Unfortunately, this kind of person had a conversation with the kind of person who doesn’t like to see standards slip over a crucial period, so it’s made abundantly clear that any significant events that happen over the Christmas period can still affect your appraisal. Or, to translate it into the words my esteemed colleague Larry used “screw up and we’ll shaft you into the middle ages” (the middle ages, for reference, were not a bundle of laughs for those of us responsible for the moral education of the entire world.)
We start preparing early for appraisals, as it involves compiling a set of “typical” cases for review, and we each get the job of anonymously reviewing a random case from our colleagues. “Typical cases” in this case officially means “cases covering a range of situations, including the most challenging and the most successful, to give a broader view of the success of the operative.” This can be translated as “a bad one you can make look good, a good one you can make look fantastic, and an average one no-one will read.”
The random reviewing of our colleagues is intended to keep us honest. Sadly, given that we’ve all been working together for several thousand years, even if we didn’t discuss our cases constantly it’d still be laughably easy to figure out who was responsible for what. Management still haven’t figured this out, and this process has been in place for 200 years, so it just goes to show how much attention they give the process. In fact, given that we can’t possibly be promoted anyway – massive population explosion on earth notwithstanding, very few positions ever open up – it does rather make you wonder what the point is.
It’s just fortunate for you lot down there that we became guardian angels due to our inherent desire to help people. I imagine management became management due to their inherent desire to make paper feel fulfilled. I can only imagine they believe that paper is manufactured with the burning desire to be signed without being read. Honestly, I’d have thought paper aspires to be involved in origami, or to give paper cuts to maniacal dictators, but management tends to have its own ideas about these things.