Cindy

Droog

Read Cindy's bio and previous columns

November 10, 2008

Grading My Days in Corporate America

I don’t own much memorabilia from my junior high days. It’s not that it was a difficult time. My soccer team was undefeated. I lived next door to my cousins, who were great fun to hang out with. And my little brother was still young and cute enough for me to lug him around town with me.

Yet I have nary a photograph of that time in my life (all ruined in an attic flood). Nor do I have any of the tape recorded soap operas my best friend Erin and I made. (If I had those, I’d have constant entertainment on hand. We even sang our own commercial jingles!) One thing I did manage to keep, however, was my diary.

And it is hilarious.

You can tell I was a bit of a nerd, always thinking about grades, because I even graded the days in my diary. “Today was a B+ day. It would have been an A day, but I didn’t see Mark in the hallway and so we did not get to flirt.”

Do kids in junior high even still use the word “flirt?” Do they even do anything less than completely making out these days? I digress . . .

There were also a few “F” days in there. “I got yelled at in Science class today. And when Dad came to pick me up at the library, he couldn’t find me and asked every kid in there. I almost died of embarrassment!”

So I thought it would be fun to start grading my days at work. Would an “A” day mean that I’d gotten through 30 of the 87 things on my to-do list, and only had to attend one meeting, that both started and ended on time? Would an “F” day be caused by a vice president walking by me in the hall and greeting me with, “Hello, Mandy?” (My name is Cindy!)

It’s an interesting concept, and not really a foreign one to corporate America.

In fact, every time I’ve had an annual review, it’s reminded me of walking home from school the day you knew report cards were going to arrive in the mail. It was never bad grades that worried me. (Remember? Nerd.) But the comments were always killer. “Cindy talks way too much in class and doesn’t focus well.” “Cindy disrupts the other children when they are trying to learn.” “Cindy is a clown.”

My parents would always make me sit at the dinner table and talk to them for what seemed like two hours – in retrospect, it was probably all of 15 minutes – about issues like disrespect and listening skills, and my retort was always the same: “But I got an A-. That’s just like an A! Why does this other stuff matter?”

As a middle management, mid-30s, mom of two today, it’s funny that I still feel like that same little kid, walking home from school dreading the conversation on annual performance review day.

One boss said I was a good writer, but not great. (To which I wanted to reply: Not what my clients say!) Another says that if a project needs to get done both well and fast, he always assigns it to me, but I’m not a patient person for long-term projects. (To which I’ve always wanted to reply: Duh!”)

So, there you have it. I wasn’t perfect then, and I’m not perfect now.

I only wish I could take my annual review – like we did with our report cards – to Chuck E. Cheese and get tokens for every “Performs Consistently with Excellence” score. After all, it is the corporate America version of an A-. And I think it’s worthy of few free games of Ms. Pac Man – or is that just the junior high kid inside me coming out again?

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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