Are You Kidding Me?

Stayed up too late last night reading Phillippa Gregory's "The Red Queen", and hence was pretty sure I would oversleep Body Pump in the AM.

At 7:30 in the morning however, I got blasted out of bed by an industrial-strength fire alarm, just like they have at work. (What is it with me and fire alarms recently?) Was totally freaked out and disoriented while covering my ears and trying to find my glasses, only to suddenly see my landlord appear in my flat to shut the darn thing off. I have no idea what happened, but it really got me up and going!

So a great start to stay up and go to Body Pump, right? Yeah right, I lay back down in bed and was back asleep in 5 minutes flat. Totally missed the class.

Still, I spent the day doing laundry and getting some work done, so it wasn't a total waste. And also, today was the big day where my boss was going to tell me my rating. Given that I had done NO work this year, and I work about 3-4 hours a day, I was totally gunning for somewhere in the big wide middle where 50% of the company falls.

So you could have knocked me flat when he told me I'd gotten a "Significantly Above" rating. Everyone in the company is ranked, so there is no way for your boss to just hand out nice ratings, for you to do well, somebody else has to have done worse. Hence, he was telling me that I'd been identified as being in the top 15% of the company. To which my response was nearly, "Are you kidding me?"

How on earth did I manage to spend an entire year doing almost NO WORK, and yet still be rated at the absolute top of the company? Is everyone I work with really THAT idiotic?

Of course, after having done almost nothing to earn this top rating, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that I was rewarded with a measly 4% raise. Won't even cover my rent increase, much less my fees at the Lansdowne, and comes too late to put me over the threshold for a Tier 1 visa. Utterly and completely useless.

So in short, my boss has managed to insult me by giving me a top rating when I've done no work, and also insult me by giving me such a pathetic raise as a reward for that work. Amazing how a good rating can turn into such an insult.

Anyway, I just thanked my boss for the news and shut down the conversation as quickly as possible, because as usual I didn't want to do any more work for the day. Time to surf the web or waste time like I usually do.

Went out to the gym in the evening and survived the Body Pump class, glad that in one area at least, I'm working hard!