Step One: Look to see if there is anyone from HR on the meeting invite list. No, thank goodness.
Step Two: Mentally prepare for a total waste of time
My “Career Manager” will be conducting my performance review. He has supposedly gathered feedback from others and has his own game-changing insights on how to improve my professional traits and further my career. Baloney. This guy doesn’t give a flying fuck about me. We’re supposed to talk every week or close to it. I talk to him maybe once a quarter and even that is infuriatingly frequent. He routinely asks me what city I live in and what level I am in the organization. He also has never, not once, asked me what I actually want to do or am interested in. I only hear from him when I don’t have a project because he has his own metrics/financial incentive to make sure his people are staffed:
“Do you have any project prospects?”…… “A few, nothing firm though, still networking”……. “You need to get staffed.”……….. “I know, do you have any leads?”……….”No.”
Mind you, it’s his freaking job to help get me on projects yet he pretends to not know this fact. He once told me to cold call people in our division to sell myself. You kidding me, bro!? Who knows, maybe he was concussed at the time and in that moment, he thought that my job was to sell magazine subscriptions to strangers. What a dick. Yet this bozo is in charge of “managing my career” and giving me constructive performance feedback. I swear to you I’d sacrifice whatever puny bonus I may be eligible for (apparently no pay raises this year) just for him and I to clear the air:
My Career Manager: “I don’t give a shit about you or your career. In case my actions over the last 1.5 years haven’t made it obvious, I find you to be a burden and pain in my ass. A chore to be postponed, like washing the carpets.
Me: “I’m keenly aware of this and I can barely restrain my rage and disdain for you whenever we do chat. Let’s never talk again. Next year just have HR send me an email with my results.”
My CM: “Agreed”
Every company I go to we have to do this song and dance; to entertain this charade that there is actual mentorship occurring and that my “manager” gives a scintilla of a shit about me. At my old job some clown I’d never heard of or seen emailed me two months in to tell me that he was my assigned company mentor. He concluded his brief email (one that he clearly was supposed to send two months earlier) by asking me if I actually want to be mentored.
My response: “No thanks.” And so concluded our mentor-mentee relationship.
When I started at my current job the company assigned me a “buddy.” A person at my level that will help me navigate the company and help me settle in. Naively, I emailed this person introducing myself only to have her respond three days later: “I don’t have time to talk to you.”
Ruthless. I certainly wasn’t immune to getting rejected by girls growing up but damn! This one was rough. Blunt and heartless. She probably forwarded the email to her attractive friends and made fun of me behind my back. “This dork thought I’d actually be his buddy!! LOL!”
I don’t need the sting of rejection from my “buddies” nor do I need absentee career fathers. What I do need is for the company to fire all the idealistic idiots who concoct these failed programs. Find me one person, one freaking person, ever, anywhere, who said: “I would have left the company years ago were it not for my company-assigned “buddy”. The “buddy” program has been so rewarding that I don’t even mind the long hours, meaningless work and stagnant pay.”
It’s these same idealists who, in honor of women’s history month, renamed all the conference rooms after famous, admirable historical women. So charming. So clever……. Except for one critical fact. I had a general idea of where rooms 10.12 and 12.22 were. The “Mary Bethune” conference room – I have no idea where the fuck that is. The entire office is 5-10 minutes late to every meeting cause we don’t even know what floor we’re supposed to be on.
Enough bullshit already. You pay me twice a month, I push papers, the client feigns interest and activity; our pathetic, corporate circle of life continues. Hakuna Matata, you maggots.
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