Friday, January 21, 2005
GRENADE-PIN SWIZZLE STICK
You can bounce me once and I ricochet
Around the room
I’m a superball
If I pick up speed, get out of my way
I’m a sonic boom
I don’t recommend revolution to everyone. It’s the province of young men with ideals and old men with nothing to lose. As it happens, I fall somewhere conveniently in between those two classifications, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be getting away with it.
I’ve reached an age at which I no longer see the point in being anything but completely honest with myself and others. I don’t see why I should suppress my feelings and opinions just so my so-called superiors can feel even better about the power they already have over me. And I flatly refuse to kiss ass, whether to get ahead or simply to get by.
On the contrary, during the course of my professional life, I’ve never been one to complain about how much money I make or whether I’m in line for a big promotion or being screwed out of a bonus. All I’ve ever asked of any employer is to be given an environment in which I can do my best work.
In November, my company instructed my co-workers and me to complete a performance development profile (PDP), in which we are expected to lay out our goals for the coming year, or, more precisely, to give the company criteria by which to judge us at this time next year.
This is the second such PDP I’ve completed since I gave up my gloriously uncomplicated life as a freelance contractor to become a salaried drone, tangled in the red tape of corporate bureaucracy. Frankly, it pissed me off the first time they made me do it, but after getting a couple of things off my chest, I got into the spirit of the enterprise and offered some suggestions for improving workflow in my little corner of the operation.
This year, however, I was not nearly so diplomatic. Rather than return the profile with all the blanks dutifully filled in, I elected to present my profile in essay form, airing my grievances and exposing certain hypocrisies and catch-22s being exercised by the Powers That Be. The general theme of my submission was the company’s recent propensity for creating obstacles that interfere with the performance of my job.
The following is the closest I came to submitting a bullet-pointed list of goals for the coming fiscal year:
- To meet the company’s expectations of quantity without sacrificing the quality I demand of myself.
- To continue to serve the English language first and the company second.
- To more regularly decline invitations to meetings, because their value is lost on me, and my work doesn’t get done while I’m sitting in them.
Absolutely nothing.
The velocity I’m gathering
Will knock you down
Send the chairs and lamps all scattering
For three weeks, nothing was said to me at all, leaving me to wonder if my superiors had even bothered to read my profile or if they were meeting in secret, trying to figure out what to do about me. Meanwhile, management continued to engage in the type of behavior that prompted me to fire a shot over their bow in the first place, and I soon got over any pangs of regret I had felt before.
Then I received a Christmas card from my supervisor, whose inscription read, “I appreciate all your work and passion.” I left town for the holidays, imagining that either I am bulletproof or I would be fired as soon as I returned to work in 2005.
When the matter of our PDPs was finally brought up, my supervisor hinted that mine in particular would require more than the usual degree of fine tuning to compensate for my complete disregard of the preferred format. To his credit, though, he suggested that the bulk of what I wrote could be appended to the end of the form, while the rest could be crafted into a list of objectives that satisfied both the points I wished to make and the projections the company wanted me to outline.
A compromise was struck, and while I am uncomfortable with the notion of guaranteeing certain numbers (which were dictated to me) toward meeting the company’s revenue goals (which I had no part in setting), I still felt I was being given more latitude than could reasonably be expected.
If you think there’ll be no aftershocks
Well, I’m a superball
Read the fine print on the back of the box
Stick to Slinkys, Hot Wheels, alphabet blocks
Thursday morning during a scheduled one-on-one session with my boss, we spoke at length about my feeling that I could be much more effective if the company would remove some of the bureaucratic shackles that have impeded me over these past several months. The boss recognized these as issues detailed in my “dissertation,” the content of which he referred to as “troubling” (although I wouldn’t fully understand that remark until later in the day). In the plus column, though, he was very open to addressing my views and seemed to understand that I’m sincere in my desire to contribute my best efforts to the daily business of the company.
Thursday evening I was at my desk after most of the staff had left, and my supervisor stopped by to let me know that the human resources department had expressed some concern about what he and I now refer to as “the appendix.”
For one thing, they wanted to know if I really wanted it to go into my permanent personnel file. And here I must have stared sort of blankly back at my supervisor, as if to say, “Their point being…?” After all, why write one of these things unless it’s going to be read by anyone and everyone who has any power to effect change in the company?
His posture implying that he wanted to throw me a life preserver, my supervisor suggested that I might want to make another pass at it, to soften the language in such a way that conveys my point without having it misconstrued by H.R. as a declaration of war. I balked at the opportunity, though, my point being that incendiary language is sometimes necessary to make people to pay attention to your message. And since I believe in my message as strongly today as I did when I drafted it two months ago, I don’t see why I should water it down.
I explained to him that I’m not trying to bring any undue heat down upon him and the boss (who, in all fairness, didn’t make up all these ridiculous new rules; they’re merely charged with enforcing them). If H.R. wants to have a dialogue with me about the things I wrote, they’re more than welcome to contact me directly. To say nothing of the fact that they can crush me underfoot like a Bordeaux grape, if they so desire. After all, I’m only one man.
Unless they happen to see me as something potentially more formidable.
The velocity I’m gathering…
(With special thanks to Aimee Mann.)
