It’s performance evaluation season, we have had two breakdowns in tears (neither of them for a bad performance review! Also one of them was mine*) and suddenly I want to write at least one fanfic in the style of a fictional team’s performance review and their response to it, where all their hidden Issues come out. People get so snarled up inside about long running unhappinesses (not just professional), and it bursts out in performance evaluations.
It’s like therapy for people who would never in a thousand years go to therapy, and also if your therapist was trying to make you do capitalism better.
*My reason for bursting into tears in front of my boss? ”Please take the management role I’ve had for 15 years away from me. All I want is to write and edit and support clients and help my team get the content right, and I am good at those but I no longer have the energy to do that on top of the constant management bullshit, and I am slipping. And there’s no obvious person to take over and do the whole thing better, and the job gets more important every day because of the way things are working out in the world...”
My boss is highly sympathetic and amenable to options, or at least good at patting me on the (zoom) head and assuring me that it’ll be all right, now I mention it I am too useful to be spending three hours navigating the expenses system on behalf of my team, we can work something out, and that was very helpful. Having a crappy boss might be better for drama purposes, but my boss is just someone working in the same imperfect system as me. Sometimes you just need someone else to tell you it will be okay, you are valuable, someone is trying to find a way to transition out of an unsustainable situation.
(Also I did not admit it to my boss but I definitely need to drink less or spend less time on tumblr/discord. Ideally both, but drink less would be a start).
