review 2019-2020
I had my annual review at work yesterday afternoon, during my routine "weekly checkin" with Eric. This was easily the first time I received one of these reviews less than a year after the last one—upper management is clearly hell bent on getting everyone on track to doing these every year, but COVID last year wound up delaying them until sometime during the summer. Based on the "last modified" dates on files I have saved, the process last year was ostensibly started in May, but not finalized until October. This year, Eric—and presumably many others—were given deadlines by which they had to have evaluations turned in for all their subordinates.
And: I can't find any record of having written about my evaluation last year, which is probably a first. I can tell you this much: my overall evaluation last year, same as it was yesterday, was "meets expectations." And of course, this was what I expected! I mean, to this day I go into these review sessions with the baggage created by that awful first review I got in 2003—eighteen years ago!—but every review I've gotten since the late 2000s has been great. I never expect to rate overall as "exceeds expections" because people have long had high expectations of me and I simply meet those. So, to me, this is fair.
Eric was very complimentary, and even went out of his way to read some highly complimentary comments Beth from Category Management had sent him. He might have had some from Scott too, as I don't doubt he would have had nothing but good things to say about me, but as it happens he's out on vacation this week.
In any event, the whole thing was about as pleasant as I could ask for, and in the end, even though in past week checkins we wound up chatting for a good hour, this time we finished and hung up within about twenty minutes. It was just as well as I have a lot of work on my plate right now.
The only other real news, which won't likely interest anyone at all but I'm going to write about it anyway, is that I kept having issues with my work computer where programs would freeze to the point of needing to restart, and when I emailed IT about it, they discovered I was still using a laptop model they "retired" last year that had been from 2016 (indeed, I had been using it since we were all first issued laptops after moving to the waterfront laptop location that very year) and so I was issued a new computer.
This meant that, when I went to the office to swap out paperwork after work yesterday—incidentally, after the first time this issue forced me to restart twice—I wound up being there for roughly an hour as Andrew from IT helped get me set up and transfer a lot of data I was concerned about to from my old laptop to the new. I was delighted that he was able to retain all my pinned documents in Excel and Word; I had to reconstruct them all from scratch once several years before and it was a real pain in the ass. I'm still have the same issue now with favorites in my web browsers but that's not quite as big a deal.
That said, I discovered this morning that the wireless dongle for my head set is not connecting to this new computer, which is effectively leaving me without a work phone unless I use the computer speaker basically as a "speaker phone." This and another minor issue regarding access to change my desktop image led me to call Andrew on my cell phone, and we were on the phone for another solid hour just before I broke for lunch, while he took remote control over my computer screens and attempted to solve the issue, initiating restarts at least four or five times in the process. He now thinks there's a defect in the dongle (even though it worked fine with the old computer) and will bring a new one by later this afternoon, along with a new connector cord needed to allow both my external monitors to work. Right now only one of them is connecting properly.
That said, I also have a lot of work still to get done today, which I thus could not get to for that hour before lunch—I didn't even have time to read my book during lunch as usual today—and I now really need to get to it so I don't wind up taking longer than 4:30 to meet today's deadline on a pretty major task. So I'll post this and get to it!
[posted 12:34 pm]