Annual Reviews

In 1996, my then-Boss decided that not only did he want periodic reports on what I do all day, but he'd also formalize the annual review for the technical staff.

Since then, I've discovered that I was the only one of the technical staff required to submit weekly reports (or, at least, i was the only one to actually do them, and nobody pushed the other guy to actually do his). I've also never bothered to find out if he ever did the annual merit review paperwork that I had to do.

It doesn't really bother me too much - I must have been doing them right, as I got big raises the years that there was money available.

I've noted that over the last few year, what I turn in keeps getting bigger. This year's review package ran 110 pages. Three pages of actual answers to required questions and 107 pages of supporting documents. Since I have to file weekly reports, I've taken to exporting my palm calendar to an excel file and pasting the last week's worth of entries into an email to my boss.

As I have the entire year's worth of activities in an excel file, I cleaned it up, sorted it into four general categories of 'What I do', totalled up the hours for it, and printed it out. 1920 hours of logged work activities (and if anyone asks about whether I'm busy, I can explain that 1920 hours, plus 176 hours of vacation, 72 hours of holidays, and about 200 hours of lunch, breaks, and etceteras that aren't included in that figure make about a 2370 hour work year, or, about 300 hours of overtime, which I don't get paid for). That makes up 64 pages of stuff.

Add to that the paper I had published last year, one of the proposals I wrote, and a few other things, and four copies suddenly require half a ream of paper, even printing double-sided. Now, of course, it's big enough that no one's ever going to read it, but I work for a beaurocracy. No one ever reads half the paperwork I have to file. I'm not sure if my boss reads even 10% of the stuff I have to send him.

Public Transit in the Winter

It seems to me that if a city like Madison wanted people to use public transportation more, they'd do more in the winter about making bus stops more usable.

I went out tonight and shoveled out the bus stops and crosswalk/curb cuts that teeka and I use to get to and from work. I didn't have to do it, but I did it because I didn't want to have to climb through the snow every day. Today, the first bus that went by, the driver looked at me like I was doing something wrong and/or illegal. The driver of the third bus stopped just to thank me for what I was doing and tell me that it was a really nice thing to do.

I'm probably going to do this again and again for the rest of the winter, but that's just the way it goes.

A "Different Kind of Education"

School would have been a lot more fun if I had gotten a work-study job at Hooters