When You Write Her Up – It Never Stops

Web Headline: His Wife Is A Stay-At-Home Mom, And After He Gave Her A Written Performance Review, She Lost It

When I read this headline, I winced, thinking what might happen if I did the same thing. I wondered what the mourners would say at my subsequent funeral –

Yeh, Don was sure an intelligent man, but that performance appraisal thing, well ….

Now, in the guy’s defense, his complicated, unusually blended family had formed internal factions and became highly dysfunctional. Which coincidentally describes the office environment at every large company I have ever worked for. Thus, the contrived idea of a written performance appraisal for his wife, I guess.

His family needed counseling, but he went for the easiest, cheapest alternative, which in this case, was far from the best. If he had asked just one guy, any guy, about this idea beforehand, he could have been saved a lot of grief.

Because if you have the insidious balls (and they better be inside you to prevent them from being ripped off) to present a written list of grievances to your wife (a marital Festivus, if you will), prepare to be presented with your wife’s unwritten list of your indiscretions, which could go back many years.

Yes, you will have opened a Pandora’s Box – appropriately named after a woman – which includes that comment you allegedly made five years ago, at some alleged dinner, that you don’t even remember, to her cousin, which was (select one):

A.     Offensive

B.     Suggestive

C.     Embarrassing

D.    Weird

E.     Stupid

F.      All off the above

To which you will probably reply: Is she the one with the enormous breasts?

And the discussion will all go downhill from there.

Rest assured that your wife’s unwritten list will dwarf your written one. And you will have totally forgotten about all your alleged transgressions, including the ones you committed yesterday, and thus, will not be able to put up even a token defense.

And in this case, the guy’s wife reacted harshly, as expected, and then yacked about it to all her girlfriends, resulting in a huge estrogen-fueled pity party, as always happens when a guy does something stupid. In this case, it was so absurd that it made its way onto the Internet, which caused a national pity party, and got the guy ridiculed as a colossal jerk. Let’s hope he didn’t “write her up” because of it.

So guys, a written performance is not recommended if your wife is not performing up to acceptable standards. What is recommended? I don’t know – maybe ask Dr. Phil.

But maybe my opinion of the performance appraisal process itself is somewhat biased ….

Performance Appraisals

During my business career, I hated the disgusting, humiliating concept of yearly performance appraisals. I wouldn’t even have agreed to do these, except you had to submit to this tortuous abuse to get a salary increase. In effect, you become a prostitute, getting screwed for money. Oh, and they do enjoy boinking you.

I’m convinced that the large companies I worked for predetermined what raise they could afford to give to you, and then wrote the performance appraisal to match the percentage increase. So:

If you were doing a great job – The company had to rip you apart to justify not giving you a higher raise.

If you were doing a poor job – The company ripped into you in hopes that you might quit.

If you were doing a fair job, well-matched to your raise amount – The company still ripped into you just because it was fun.

They asked you to rate yourself to make it appear fair, but they don’t even look at your drivel most of the time. When I was young and naïve, I spent over an hour writing my first self-appraisal. At the end, it was pencil-whipped in five minutes.

At one of my former employers, where the appraisals were the worst, I was skewered for the type of neckties I wore, who I ate lunch with, and other trivial matters. Instead of being at home with my wife the week after my second daughter was born, I came in to work to launch a new product I was responsible for (the project ran two weeks late, and my daughter arrived three weeks early, creating the conflict). Still, I received a grade of “needs improvement” on the “Is Committed to the Job” metric on my performance appraisal just two months later. The former company president is buried at the same cemetery as my parents. I hope I never happen upon his gravestone after drinking a couple of liters of Dr. Pepper.

One of the jokes I planned to use in this post is to ask what I would rather do:

A.   Go through a performance appraisal at work?

B.   Have a vigorous prostate exam?

Funny joke, I reasoned, but then I truly pondered it. Both examinations are intrusive, highly disgusting, painful, and degrading. And surprisingly, my preference, provided I still received the same raise after either option, is the prostate exam. Something is going up my @$$ anyway, it may as well be only a finger and corporations eschew rubber gloves! 

I reason that the prostate exam is shorter in duration, and once your sphincter returns to its original size, you are all fine and normal. And I have also passed all my prostrate exams and have never been criticized by my doctor during the procedure. Whereas I could be upset and sore for a whole month after getting my @$$ ripped apart in a performance appraisal. Maybe you guys who are still working can suggest this alternative next time you are due for a performance appraisal.

Final Words of Wisdom

So guys, never give your wife or woman a written performance appraisal. And at work, don’t spend much time doing your self-appraisal, and remember to always keep your sphincter tight during the actual performance review.