Taking a Moment for a Little Self Evaluation
It’s that time of year again for the employees of Hydra Hydraulics, the annual employee evaluations. Ideally, there’s a meager raise involved with the evaluation to offset the slimmest fraction of rising inflation. Of course, there are no raises for me any time in the near future. As I’m reminded almost daily, I am already vastly overpaid.
This could be true. By Alabama standards, I can afford to gas up the Jeep once a month and still have enough money left over for some chicken nuggets and a couple comic books. When I transitioned from the most carefree supervisor ever to don a collared shirt to becoming the most lackadaisical chrome technician ever to apathetically shrug his shoulders in the face of an urgent need for unrealistically high production numbers, it was with the understanding that nobody would be fucking with my cash. This makes me one of the highest paid jackasses on the floor which is hilarious considering that for most of the twenty-odd years spent draining money out of Hydra’s coffers, I’ve taken great pains to keep my practical work knowledge to the barest minimum.
So, despite my best efforts to remain utter ineffectual, I’m still mildly surprised by how poorly I scored on my annual evaluation.
I don’t suppose Hydra evaluations differ much from employee reviews handed out any other incompetently managed machine shop. People are judged in such jackassy categories as production, quality, attendance, cleanliness, attitude, and in my case, I get a bonus category, leadership. Employees are graded on a scale from one to five. One being your ass is fixing to have to go find a job at Burger King. A five would be considered Jesus descending from his heavenly throne atop Trump Tower and being unable to match your industrious skill.
I’m not gonna lie; back in the day, I knocked down quite a few impressive scores on my evaluations. This was back when Randy ran the show. That poor bastard correctly surmised that I was an incredibly groovy cat. Of course, I am. Sadly, it’s been my experience, the radiance of my character tends to incite resentfulness, often times, downright hatred from men afflicted by the possession of small penises and personalities as bland as ham and cheeses sammiches. In the case of Randy, however, he took a shine to me because I led him to believe that I believed he was an incredibly groovy dude.
Such is not the case with my current taskmaster, Bippy the Chihuahua-Cornholing Clown. A man we’ve lately taken to calling Emmett due to his Lego man physique and uncanny ability to move very quickly without bending his elbows or knees. What it comes down to is, I don’t like him because he doesn’t like me.
Anyway, I was one of the last jackasses to be called into the supervisor’s office for an evaluation. I knew this to mean that he expected to hear a lot of whining and belly-aching outta me. When I was a supervisor, I saved the problem children for last as well. It goes without saying I was exceedingly generous with the evaluations and raises for the employees under my umbrella. I depended on them for everything, of course, I was going to take care of them. It wasn’t like it was my money I was giving away. Fuck Hydra. Why would I deprive one penny from a man trying to support his family on mediocre wages? Still, there were some folks you just couldn’t please, and I saved the ingrates for last.
The supervisor, I won’t give him a name because he’s a bit of a nonentity, isn’t a bad guy as far as knuckleheads go. He’s just simple-minded and prone to vicious backstabbing as befitting his job title. His complete subjugation to Bippy the Clown has turned him neurotic and petty. He still has his affable moments. He’s like a puppy who continually shits six inches to the right of the newspaper’s outer edge. His is a predictable sort of stupidity. Dependable, even.
Before he even shows me the evaluation, he’s already apologizing.
“If it were up to me, Polish Hammer, you’d have high numbers across the board. You always do what’s needed. But, you know, Bippy had to have his say.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let me just stop you right there, buddy. You know I don’t give a shit about any of this, right? The job. The company. It’s a nuisance I barely tolerate. They already told me I won’t be getting another raise this decade so it’s not like I have any motivation to do anything above and beyond the bare minimum.”
People who don’t know any better would mistake this for speaking truth to power, but since I recognize no authority higher than my own, it’s got to be something else.
Regardless, the scores sting a tad. Threes across the board, with a two in cleanliness, which is fair. Liquid chrome makes a mess, and I’m rarely in the mood to clean it up. Also, I got a two in leadership. Odd because I lead a two-man crew. Myself and my son who’s ungovernable apathy rivals my own. The three in attendance would be problematic if I cared since I haven’t missed a day of work all year, and I usually average a sixty hour work week. I shudder to think how many fucking hours I’d have to work to get a four.
Perhaps sensing my disdain, the supervisor adds “there’s nothing wrong with threes. Threes mean you did exactly what was expected of you.”
“The numbers are arbitrary, buddy. They mean nothing. They define nothing. They reflect the silly grievances of a cadre of fools I harbor zero respect for.”
“I guess that’s one way of looking at it. I didn’t like my evaluation, either.”
That’s because you’re so bad at your job. I didn’t say it, but I certainly implied it with my eyes. Sometimes, people don’t like to have mysteries solved for them.
Funny thing is, my son got the exact same scores on his evaluation as I did, and he was as stoked as his natural stoicism allowed. It was by far the best evaluation he had received in his entire professional career. I guess the fearless leaders at Kentucky Fried Chicken were a bit more hard-nosed when it came to passing judgment on their underlings.
In the end, they’re in no position to really do anything about me and my poor work ethic. Nobody else wants this fucking job, I’m not in a place where I can do anything about it, either. I’m not prepared to jump headlong into the world of “full time writing” as I like to call unemployment. I’m far too enamored of money. I’m too beholden to the accumulation of material possessions. Those signed first editions ain’t free, and I have a collection I’d evaluate at a solid four. I’d like to pump that number up to five before the end of things.
Anyway, what the annual evaluation fails to cover is the sheer amount of creative writing I do on the clock. I’m on the clock, now, as I write this, as I have been for eighty percent of the columns I’ve written. I wrote my debut novel, Mister Joe’s Pirates, available for preorder from Roadside Press while on the clock when I could have been cleaning the chrome shop, or, I don’t know, leading harder. And for what? A number on a piece of paper? I know I would have scored a 5 in evasiveness if that were a category on my evaluation for being able to write three hours out of every shift despite the forty-eight fucking surveillance cameras monitoring our every move.
Or, hell, maybe they are well aware, and just can’t find another dumb Polack stupid enough to replace me. Who can say?
All I know, based on the evaluations of my writing, I’m still rolling threes. At least, that’s how many interactions I average on social media with regard to my writing. Which is, to quote my son, “the best I’ve done, yet.”
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
