Performance Evaluations

Yesterday I had to lay off a young, hardworking employee so that I could keep Mustafa -- an old, incompetent, lazy, passive-agressive bastard who is taking Friday off so I can't -- on my payroll. Shit ain't right. My more-competent employee may be a grown man with a shrill laugh more girlish than my five-year-old daughter's, and he may have an underdeveloped sense of professionalism, but dammit, he actually works on shit when I ask him to. You may ask why I can't just fire Mustafa instead. Turns out when you're a member of four protected groups (elderly, foreign, minority religion, slightly disabled) and old family friends with my boss's boss's BOSS, and you have a spouse on the faculty in the same department -- HR won't let you "just get fired." So we're doing these performance evaluations where Mustafa and I sit down with my boss-of-sorts and we go through his job description and enumerate the ways in which he has failed at his modest tasks. This is a painful procedure that I dread every week. In fact, I made my wife have a baby just so I could get out of a month of these evaluations. But I've got one lined up for Friday -- OH SHIT HE'S TAKING FRIDAY OFF! YES! Hot damn, another evaluation postponed! Anyway, the idea is that these evaluations are supposed to (a) lead to the possibility of firing Mustafa or (b) make him realize it might be time to retire, but neither (a) nor (b) is happening as of yet.

I'm supposed to be working on his eval, so I've been thinking about million-dollar t-shirt ideas instead.



Here are a couple of my ideas:

1. Scrawled in fake handwriting: "I'd rather get laid oft than laid off!"

2. A drawing of William Shakespeare (a.k.a. the Bard of Avon, for the slow among you), and above him, in beautiful cheesy calligraphy: "I have a BARD-ON for reading!"



Just spitballing some ideas here. Returning to my terrible management skills -- Mustafa's strategy for keeping his job is primarily to send me a shitload of emails anytime I ask him to do something. So I'll ask him to do a simple task and he'll shoot back (four hours later) an email filled with inane questions that I don't have time to address, along with a list of impediments towards doing his work. Then, when it comes up in the performance evaluation that he's fucked everything up beyond hope of redemption, he can say "Lazlo didn't answer my email about this, so how could I possibly know what I'm supposed to do?" My counterstrategy has yet to be created.



Anyway, this was a blog post I wrote. I was at a Thanksgiving feast the other day (and it was a feast!) and I came up on two friends who said "we were just talking about your blog." I immediately felt the awakening of a long-dormant sense of shame I once knew well, pertaining to not writing enough on my blog. I'm going to turn 31 tomorrow, and I don't want to be that lame 31-year-old with a shitty dead blog just hanging out on the Internet, so I'm going to try to post a bit more. Blame Twitter for my lack of posting, btw.

Yeah, Twitter.