Oy, I am currently 100% caught up in my grading, have my lecture for Monday all lined up, and was looking forward to a pleasant weekend with no obligations for a change.
Then I get an email reminding me that my yearly performance review is on Monday.
Can I just go in and say I’m very, very tired and am counting the seconds to the end of the semester? How about if I just walk into the chair’s office and curl up on the floor sobbing? I’m hoping that’s adequate preparation. Just once this term I’d like to have a quiet day off, and I worked hard to get everything cleared away. I even scrubbed and autoclaved all the fly bottles! And put them away! I ought to be given a pass on this review just for that.
Go in, sit down, and nonchalantly pull out an apple and start eating.
Ah yes, this science hobby is all very well, but is your filing up to date, have you filled in all the forms, have you cl9cked in at 9am every day, do you wear a suit to lecture, have your spiders earned any money….?
No, no, yes!, no, no.
Gilda said it better than I ever could… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPgoWxT1PMc
I hear sexually predatory academics do very well these days. People make loads of excuses for them. Takes years to get rid of them, and even then there’s the lucrative “cancelled” circuit. Go to the meeting wearing only some revealingly tight underwear (leopard print or snakeskin, natch) open with the line “How’s my performance? How do you think it is, gorgeous? Rawr!”. Guaranteed promotion.
I believe that to be how The Sexual Inappropriateness is done.
Louis
P.S. Of course I’m not serious. The underwear should be hot pink.
A quarter century since Gilda Radner died, and I still miss her.
Words cannot express the contempt to which I hold performance reviews. I’m almost 50, I must have had dozens of them, and I cannot say that a single one was worthwhile for anything at all. The employees don’t want to do them, the managers don’t want to do them, it’s questionable whether there was ever such a review conducted that did more than waste the time of everyone involved.