Old-School Dave-Blog #1 - Operational Performance

For the next little while, I'm going to be looking back at an old blog I used to write and publishing a few select posts from it here. This one in particular, about my first review when I worked for Bell, illustrates a few things about where I'm at now in my career/life. It's interesting to look back a few years and see a lot of the same issues, and how it relates to what I'm doing to change some things. Enjoy!

Thursday, November 24th, 2005, 9:48PM:

I hate review time at work. Since this is my first one at this particular company, I got to see whether or not the past six months have been worth my while. I guess it went ok.

The shit-kicker is, my boss has left the company. Today was actually his last day, and one of the things he wanted to get out of the way before he left was the reviews for the whole team. He wasn't really doing the whole review though, he was just prepping the person who was going to take over for him. Kind of like a mid-year review, even though it's the end of November. So I go into this meeting with him, flush from running back and forth from the printer for the last half-hour (all first thing in the morning, mind you), carrying an armload of paper 3/4 of an inch thick thinking I have to prove to him, with hard copies, that I'm a good hard-working employee and he shouldn't have any reason to doubt that.

So after all that, after sweating bullets all night and all morning, after the months of agonizing self-doubt thinking that I'm nothing more than a hack and I'm not going to prove anything to him and he should just fire me and get it over with - AFTER ALL THAT - he only looks at one document. Not only that, but we spend more than half-an-hour talking about all the things I have to get done before the end of the year to properly meet my performance objectives. Because in another three weeks, I'm going to have to do this all over again before my reputation will be finalized.

See, I didn't get this job the old fashion way - well, maybe I did in this day and age - but I didn't just apply and rely on my natural charm and expertise to beat out hundreds of other applicants and wow the shit out of my boss. No, my dad set this interview up for me. At the time, he was VP of Operations at this company, so I was a bit of a shoe-in.

So all the time that I've been here, there's been this nagging thought running through the back of my mind: "Do I really belong here? Would I have been able to get this job without my dad's assistance? Or are they all just humoring him by letting me play IT monkey for a little while? I should just get out of this industry altogether." Well, today I was going to find out, one way or another. I wanted to ask them for some real feedback - not just a cursory pat on the back and a thumbs up with fingers crossed behind their back. I guess I really didn't have to, because as I was listening to my boss discuss with me how I was doing on some of the more obscurely-worded points of my OPR, I realized that maybe I'm not doing so bad after all. At one point, my boss even said he was "pleasantly surprised" at how I just kind of hit the ground running.

Understand, when I talk about the people at the company humoring dad by letting me play IT monkey for a little while, I wasn't serious. Nor do I really think that's what's going on; rather I've just been so wracked with self-doubt over the last few months that I've almost convinced myself it's the truth.

Maybe that means it's time to strike out on my own. Hmm...