One Week Down, One To Go

Last week wasn't a particularly great one, at work. I finally had the performance review chat with the boss (no raise communicated yet, though, so I can still dream of 5%). Despite all his best intentions, it's always depressing because my weak areas are always the same and I'm so unmotivated to do anything about them. He was kind enough to beef up - ugh, poor choice of words, as I'm still feeling slightly crappy from my Beef Bender - the comments sections after I complained that they were a little on the light side. Apparently my laissez-faire attitude toward the whole review process translated to not caring at all about the review itself, which is an understandable interpretation. But I figure if we're going spend the time to bother doing it, then it really should represent what my year looked like. So now it does.

I also seemed to be drawn into a ridiculous number of debates this week, in person, over e-mail and on the electronic forums. Casual reflection probably tells me that I should expect this as part of the job, and yet it continues to wear me down. At some point, I think, discussion has given way to debate. Why none of us - myself included - are as interested in understanding the other person's POV as we should be, I can't really say.

Then there was the Retrospective facilitation task that was asked of me at 9:00 in the morning, for 11:00 that same day, in which the dropping-out facilitator assured me the Feature Lead had done all of the organization for it, only for me to find out that the FL believed that it was all safely in the facilitator's hands! Thankfully we had time to do a little prep before 11:00 and it seemed to go OK, but it was definitely the most under-planned Retrospective I've done yet.

For whatever reason, I thought I'd try to help out with the problem of how to replace the handful of Feature Leads we're about to lose (resuming their previous functions) and met with pretty much universal resistance at every turn. Despite it supposedly being the Season of Giving, no one appears to be the least bit willing to sacrifice their own agendas at all in order to help out in this area, even just in the short term. I did find out, though, that this isn't really my problem, but I can't help but feel responsible so I suspect I'll continue to be involved.

On the bright side, though, that week's over now and only one more to go before some blessed down time. At the moment I appear to have free lunches being provided three of the five days (Feature Team Lunch, VP Direct Report Lunch, and Company Turkey Lunch). That's gotta count for something, right? And no, I won't be eating steak!