… that’s yer problem right there.
Gaaah, I can’t wait to get a place I don’t have to share a kitchen again… I’m in a house shared with international PhD students, due to an extreme lack of options in the area. 2 of the 3 are -minus a few quirks- easy enough to get along with. There’s an ongoing passive-aggressive war over open windows, but we talk, I even hang round with one of them outside the house.
The third… well, she doesn’t appear to speak more than a few words of English, for a start, which is a bit odd, as she supposedly passed a quite difficult language exam to get on the course. Any conversation more elaborate than ‘It’s cold’ ends in us staring at each other in mutual incomprehension. There’s plenty of international students here- they’re all as confused as I am about how she got in; she was apparently replying to all comments with the phrase ‘No speak’ for several months.
I am honestly doing better in Spanish after a few weeks on Duolingo than she is in - at least spoken- English after several years in the country.
She’s also utterly unconcerned about everyone else’s comfort; gets up at 4am to loudly cook, slams doors, and generally acts like she’s the only person around. It’s really getting a bit annoying, especially given the fact that she clearly doesn’t understand requests to be quieter. She also has a tendency, when I’m making dinner, to completely ignore the obvious fact that I’m just about to start using the cooker. So, my pans are on there warming up, sauces and oil right next to the stove, and I’m just chopping the final few vegetables and she just walks in, grabs something out the cupboard, and without a word starts cooking, using our one little shared cooker which is far too small for two people to use at once. If I say anything I just get a reply of ‘Is OK!’ or ‘I use’ and she carries right on…
Frequently she takes over the whole kitchen for most of the day on weekends. I can barely get the space to boil the kettle.
I get that it must be difficult to study in a country where you don’t speak the language- especially when you’re the only student from your country on campus- and it’s probably pretty unpleasant to share a house with multiple people who you share neither a language nor culture with, so yeah, that’s probably why she basically ignores the rest of us, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t fecking cheat on the damn language exam?
I immediately got the feeling she understands everything you’ve said to her, but figured out that if she keeps on with what she’s doing, she gets her way.
Oh, I really hope you catch her speaking fluent English to a friend. It’s a perfect sitcom plot!
I feel badly for you. ( I think you’re being manipulated though. )
Even if sex was guaranteed afterwards, I’m not sure I could sit through a flute recital.
Some worthless sack of shit charged almost $2,000 of Herman Miller furniture to my mom’s credit card. 
The charge has been reversed, the account has been closed, and BoA is sending her a new card, but now Mom is still worried that she’s going to be held responsible for the charge.
Also, my visit to the dentist on Friday was a complete waste of time because the lab screwed up two of the four permanent crowns, so I have to go back again on Thursday. At least I didn’t get charged for that…
Hey, on some dates, getting a flute recital actually is… oh never mind.
“Youth. It’s wasted on the wrong people.” - It’s A Wonderful Life
I’ve seen some blues/rock bands with a flautist and it was cool. Oh, also an Irish/Punk band.
ETA: but they dint do recitals.
…until I got to the parenthetical aside…
Now, wait, if the woman with the flute is of higher quality than the “guaranteed sex” option, I could understand.
Wait… maybe the reason the sex is guaranteed is that he’s paying for it. So the recital will be a lot cheaper…
.
And what woman can resist getting back together with the only guy she’s ever met that would sit through one of her flute recitals?
Well, maybe if she payed more attention to the underside…
( what…? )
I assume the issue isn’t the flute, it’s the recital.
One of my employees is pissed at me that I gave them a kind of bland review. Every time over the past year when I would talk to her, she’d tell me, “Oh, no updates, everything’s running smoothly.” Or she’d flat out cancel, saying she had nothing to tell me. As her accomplishments, she listed things she was doing that were standard expectations, like, “I answered a lot of questions today.”
So my review was that she’s a solid performer, no above and beyond but decent job. She comes back with “This is the hardest I’ve ever worked, I’ve never had to do this much and I’ve accomplished so much, why am I not getting a better review?!” Then she lists about half a dozen things she literally never me about regardless of how much probing I did or follow up with her peers (she didn’t tell them, either). They weren’t hugely impactful but definitely demonstrated a much better effort than she represented.
I feel bad but at the same time, I can’t accurately tell my leadership why you deserve more money if you don’t tell anyone what you’re doing, including your freaking manager. If you tell me verbatim, “Not much is happening, let’s not meet today,” for three weeks in a row, I’m going to assume that means nothing is happening and give you a solid but not special review. Don’t tell me you’re not doing anything then get mad at me when I don’t tell my leadership how much of an overachiever you are.
Gah. I hate this. I feel like a total asshole but I literally have no way of knowing this stuff if she tells absolutely no one about her accomplishments until after the year ends and merit raises are announced.
You’re not an asshole. This is a valuable lesson your employee needs to learn. When you are working your ass off and getting a lot accomplished, it doesn’t count unless you communicate it, or have some other metric you can point to (sales made, cases closed, projects completed, it all depends on the job). That’s all part of being a professional. It’s incumbent on everyone to keep track of what they’re doing and communicate that to supervisors. I’ve been doing that for decades.
If you act like you’re not doing anything, don’t get mad when someone assumes you’re not doing anything. Nobody watches a duck in a pond and marvels at how fast the duck is paddling, since that’s happening underwater.
True.
The downside is that once it gets out that people can only get a nice salary bump if they toot their own horn like Louis Armstrong, suddenly all your reviews are going to look like manuscripts fit for Simon & Schuster.
"I was passing the jammed copier when I saw Draco Malfoy bullying poor Neville again. When Draco tripped him as he was trying to clear a piece of paper jammed behind the paper tray, I’d finally had enough. My wand seemed to move by itself. <Explodioso…!>
The entire cloud of toner swirled about and settled on the unsuspecting Draco, making him look just for a moment like Billy Idol with spiky hair and brunette hair streaks. Crabbe and Goyle helped him into the Men’s to wash up and I did have to explain myself to a team meeting later… but the copier was returned to service and copies of the Davenport Proposal were ready for signing for all partners in the conference room for the merger meeting on time. I consider that morning a success."
The law of diminishing returns will eventually apply though.
“Wait a minute! I inspired an old man in a tiny fishing boat to fight with a Marlin out at sea for days in a titanic test of wills! How come I didn’t get any bump this review period?”
Once that happens, where can anyone… reviewee or reviewer… really go from there?
Assuming that you told the employee that she needed to tell you what she was doing so she could get credit for it (which I assume you did). My managers over the years were (usually) clear that they could only reward me for things that they knew I had done.
Which did lead to some of the issue nicely laid out below:
There needs to be a balance between shameless self-promotion and acting like you’re not doing anything.
Hopefully there is some way to corroborate a person’s accomplishments. As I said before…
In my case I am IT customer support, so my main job is to make it so that everyone in my sphere of responsibility is able to work and be happy. As long as they are happy, I get great job reviews. Which is awesome, honestly. As long as you don’t work with assholes that are impossible to please (I don’t) it is the best kind of job in the world. You become the most popular person around.
On the other hand, I’m a unionized public employee. I don’t get merit raises. I get paid whatever amount is negotiated between my agency and my union, and then approved by the legislature and governor. I could probably do a crappy job and as long as I wasn’t so terrible that they could justify termination (after an extended investigation), I’m sure I’d make the same amount I do now. But I like doing my best and helping people, so I’d never do that.
Several years ago, I messed up my shoulder in a car accident and now, every once in a while, it will hurt. Well, yesterday, my daughter wrenched my arm back and irritated my shoulder and it hurts. It hurts a lot. It’s my dominant side so I use it a lot and it hurts. And, because it hurts, I’m grumpy. I’m a grumpy grump pants. I have taken the ibuprofen and I am waiting for it to work. But, until thing, harrumpf!
Thanks for your replies, guys! My frustration is that we document in excruciating detail, “This is the baseline expectation. These are examples of what might qualify as above and beyond, but if you have other ideas, our job is to get things out of your way.”
Never once during any of these meetings did this person say, “Oh, I’m track to meet this goal. And oh, by the way, I thought of this idea that’ll make our product that much better.” It was more along the lines of, “I’ve owned this product for three years and when you realized I didn’t have a process to make sure we were billing all of our clients, I made one like you said I should. I did and realized we hadn’t billed half our clients for at least three years. So I started billing them. See, I made the company money! Also, I said I would make sure my product doesn’t violate any laws. It doesn’t! Oh, and I created a new report. Therefore, my reviews should reflect that I went above and beyond and I should earn more money.”
I like carguru.com you can search by new/used, zip code, price and mileage, if you don’t know what you want or add other parameters if you know you don’t want a manual transmission. It gives you other useful information such as how long it has been for sale, and whether the site thinks it is a good price.
Can’t circle or write on but you can save or mark choices. But my experience with car lot ads is most of those cars they advertise are just to get you into the door so they can jack up the price.