The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Every year around this time, I am asked to log my accomplishments into a personnel system of some sort. It’s one of the most dreadful tasks that I have to complete annually. Why you might ask? Because what I see as accomplishments are not necessarily viewed as such by people higher up on the work food chain.

What becomes most frustrating about this task is how different parts of my company have different criteria for judging a year of work. Let me backtrack a bit.

I have to work on a daily basis with a site that is in another state. There is something wrong with the work ethic at this site. The people who work there very often do not return phone calls or answer emails. Even after numerous calls to individuals and hundreds of voicemails are left, not a single phone call is received in return. Although, I send follow up emails, cc’ing everyone higher up on a specific person’s chain of command, no replies. It’s really incredibly fascinating…the amount of work that I have to do to get an answer and the remarkably little amount of work they do to never get their jobs done.

So, here is my gripe. I’m positively sure that they get compensated very well for this kind of behavior. Whereas I’m sure I get squat in comparison. I’m held to impossibly high standards and get nothing for it even though I would consider myself a high performer. While these ninnies do nothing and get more. Does that strike you as odd? It does to me.

Now why does this happen, you might ask? I wish I knew. I attribute a lot of it to kissing derrieres and complaining - two things of which I don’t do much (although you might think differently since I’m writing a complaint here). I really can’t kiss up to people…I think it’s the visual of it that bothers me so much. If I like you, I’ll talk to you. If I don’t, I’ll avoid you. Just because you are higher up doesn’t mean you deserve my respect. Respect is a two way street. If you show me respect, I’ll reciprocate. Otherwise, you can pretty much…I’ll let you finish that sentence. And complaining, my mom always said “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it.” Since I very rarely have anything nice to say, I just keep quiet. And it’s not like I’m tactless when I do give my opinions. I’ve just found that people don’t really want to hear anything negative - even though I always provide suggestions and positive spin on most of my comments.
So…that’s why I hate writing my accomplishments….Did I explain myself? Probably not.