You know the movie, “Office Space”? One thing I like to do when this movie comes up in conversation is to ask people to figure out which character they are. The only caveat is they cannot pick Peter. Peter is the charater everyone wants to be, but no one really is.
Today I discovered I’m really Peter.
You see, I stopped actually giving a flying fuck about my job about the time it became evident they don’t give a flying fuck about me or anyone else here. I’ve been doing a half-assed job, leaving early, posting on the SDMB, reading Salon, and basically doing fuck-all for six out of eight hours a day. My stress level has gone down. It’s very liberating to stop caring about your job.
Today, I got my annual review (three months late), I was ranked “above-average” to “outstanding” in all catagories, and was given a substantial raise. True, the general caliber of worker here isn’t anything to write home about, but if I’m an outstanding worker, this company has some serious problems.
Don’t feel bad. In reviewing my work history, I’ve realized that I’ve most often been the hatchet dudes from the corporate office who came in to reassign and fire people. :eek:
I’m gonna say that I am also Peter. I slack off at my job, do a lot of reading (both in books and online) while at work, and have even skipped out on two days of work. So what’s happening to me? Well, my current job is to travel a different hospitals and help out the current biomedical technicians there. Starting in November, I will be the chief biomedical technician in a hospital and the guy who I’m replacing will have my job, meaning that when he shows up to my (formally his) hospital I get to boss him around.
This is also amaxing because I have only had this job for three months, and had NO experience in the field before i had the job. I’m thinking that I should just stop showing up to work at all and become director of the department.
You know the scene where Lumbergh gives the “inspirational pep talk” to his employees, and they all stand there with a broken, crushed spirit?
There’s one guy in the back holding a cup of coffee, nodding his head, like he’s hanging on Lumbergh’s every word. You can almost hear inside his mind, as he says to himself, “Man! This is some good stuff!”
We just got one of those in our office. And I give him a week before people start pelting him with rocks and garbage.
What it is, when you started slacking off knowledgably, you stopped making waves. The people who are a problem are the people who cause problems, often by making issues out of nothing — complaining about this and insisting on changing that. They grumble constantly about how much work they have to do and how unfair everything is. You, on the other hand, found a way to be quietly invisible, and when you were considered in the review process, they basically just said, “Hey, you know what? This guy never stirs up any shit.” High marks for that.
Yep, I was kind of like Peter at the job I had before my son was born. I did all the word processing for a small insurance agancy, meaning I did all the sales proposals for the five salesmen who worked there. They honest-to-God thought I typed them up from scratch every time they gave me something, but I had several boilerplate templates ready to go for the different proposals they each used. I just had to fill in the names and numbers and tweak it a little bit.
They’d give me a proposal on Monday morning, and tell me they didn’t need it till Wednesday. I’d have it done in about an hour, then I’d read a book, or the newspaper, or a magazine, leisurely sort through the mail, and give them the proposal mid-day Tuesday, all finished and ready. They were ecstatic that it was ready a day early.
I was always getting ‘outstanding’ reviews. No one had the slightest idea how easy my job really was. It was also very easy to pretend to be working on something all the time. I had a high edge on my desk that I could hide books under, and could see people coming from all directions.
