*****
Well, Wednesday and Thursday of last week, we got checked out by our accrediting agency. The inspector's visit came as a surprise--it always does, they give you a two-month window and the inspection can be any time within that time frame--but I had no fears. As far as my role in accreditation goes, all I have to do is avoid doing anything dramatically stupid and I'm okay.
My boss freaks out and lies. I sometimes wonder why, as some of the lies he is telling do no good whatsoever. For example, we have a certain variety of equipment huddled--cleaned, bagged, and tagged--in one corner of our warehouse that is not fully up to snuff. These units have been donated to us, or have almost reached the end of their useful lifespan, and we have deleted them from our official inventory. They work, but not at peak efficiency, and we have set them aside to use for charity cases. Everyone knows what they are for and I have even tagged them with that pertinent information.
But when our inspector saw them and asked what they were for, rather than just say what I just said, my boss lied and said that they were old units that were being kept for parts!
We don't even carry some of those brands. What would this colossal, lying sack of squeeze have done if the inspector had actually looked at one of the tags and found my description? Why take such a chance? There was literally no advantage whatsoever to telling a lie and the son of a dog lied anyway.
That's how habitual it is with him.
Throughout the inspection, the boss took pains to avoid having the inspector alone with any one employee, so that he could dominate the conversation. It was painfully clear to everyone of us that he was deathly afraid that one of us would blurt out the truth about something he'd lied about. It is hard for me to believe that the inspector wasn't made suspicious by his behavior alone.
Still, we passed the inspection handily, with the only real actions to be taken being a couple of administrative actions that he needed to take.
One of these was making sure that we--the employees--had goals recorded. Can't do anything without goals, you know.
So, today, the so-and-so e-mailed out a form for employee self-evaluation, which concluded with a section for setting goals.
Of course, he hadn't made up the form, and there were a couple of questions on it that frankly, given our situation, didn't make much sense. For instance, it asked if I thought I had made good progress on the goals set during my last evaluation.
My last evaluation? I objected to my boss that I couldn't be expected to remember what my last evaluation said, as to the best of my recollection, it was made in 2006!
That made him get huffy, and he averred quite snottily that he had much more recent documents in my file than that, with my signature, if I wanted to inspect them. And you know, while I was out making a small delivery, I decided that I did want to see the last one, as whenever it was done, I certainly couldn't remember what was on it.
He had it waiting for me when I got back. It was dated--drum roll, please--June 18, 2010. More than four years ago. I allowed as how I had been four years off, and the organization was four years behind.
Now, think about this for a minute. First, it is quite obvious that my boss was utterly without a clue. The poor, useless spazz clearly thought he'd been evaluating me. That was both why he snapped at me and why he dug out the last evaluation before I'd asked for it--he thought he was going to shove my comments down my throat!
Instead, they died in his. Turned out that my other driver hasn't been evaluated in years. Our biller can't remember ever having been evaluated. Nor our warehouseman. Of "the girls" up front, the only one who's been there more than a year has never been evaluated.
I asked every single one of them save the warehouseman to go to the boss and ask for a copy of their last evaluation. I hope they do it. I hope he turns a bright, tomato-red.
Second, it's been four freaking years since I was evaluated! Frankly, in managerial terms, this is gross neglect, bordering on outright misconduct. Not that I didn't know it'd been a long time. I did. It just didn't matter to me because in this organization, your raises have nothing to do with your performance. Instead, every once in a great while, you are given the exact same percentage raise the entire rest of the organization gets. You can be mediocre or you can be great--makes no difference, with very rare exceptions. How they don't understand that that is a recipe for resentment and mediocrity is beyond me.
Third, what kind of doorknob neglects such an area of his own job on such a massive scale and then has the nerve criticize any employee for anything?
Fourth, had our inspector not indirectly raised the issue, he wouldn't be looking at evaluating anyone now. The neglect would still be going on!
Fifth, this destroys any claim he might make to giving a squat about any of our employees.
Sixth, apparently, his superiors have no way of tracking or knowing whether he is evaluating his employees! What do you bet he gets evaluated annually? But they apparently don't give a shinola about us. Not that this is any great surprise. It is yet another reason leadership in the organization is despised throughout the system.
It is going to be with GREAT difficulty that I keep sarcasm out of my filled-out form. I will, in the "appraisal period" space, note (and make a hard copy of, to prevent editing by others) that the appraisal period ran from June 18 of 2010 to the present.
But when I leave, I'm not going to have anyone calling this workplace and have anyone be able to honestly say that I was any kind of a jerk before I left. So I'll leave it at that.
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