Over the holiday break I spent a lot of time thinking about my job and more specific to that, my performance at my job. A year ago I received a performance review that I was far from happy with, and to this point I’m honestly surprised I wasn’t one of the many in my industry who lost their jobs for one reason or another. It was bad enough that in a subsequent meeting with my supervisor to clarify some of the things we discussed, I mentioned an “air of inevitability” about my position. I was lucky, however. Very lucky, I think.
My problem wasn’t with the quality of my work. I was told that I did my job as well as anybody else, but I wasn’t as assertive as I should be. I didn’t disagree with this evaluation at all. I’ve always been a wallflower, more or less, and if I could sit in my corner, crank out quality parts in a timely fashion and never turn work away, then I was golden. This wasn’t enough, though. Right or wrong, I was giving the impression that I didn’t understand the severity of information delays and timing issues as they came up, which was often.
In evaluating myself for 2009, I felt good about the progress I’d made in fixing this, and while I was given some indication that I had improved, it still wasn’t enough and again my review wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. Fixing this will require a fairly drastic change in myself, and I’m ready and willing to do all I can to make that happen, however, I can’t help but admit that I feel a little overwhelmed by it. In the few days since, I think I’ve already done well, but it’s been hard. For ten years I was told that everything I was doing was fantastic, but this snuck up on me. Again, I don’t disagree. I just hope I can overcome it and become a better worker.
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Now I’m thinking I’d like to learn something new. Not work-related, but in my spare time. I used to come home, get on the computer, talk with the boys, play the Playstation, and generally do pretty much nothing before going to bed and doing it all over again the next day. I took a programming class and I was burned out halfway through the semester. I don’t think that was the path I wanted to take.
Today my six-year-old and I watched a show about the earth’s climate on The History Channel. It was awesome. It measured and highlighted major climatic changes over the last few million years and gave strong theories explaining why these changes occurred and what resulted from them. 11,500 years ago a drastic climatic change occurred that raised the earth’s average temperature by 18 degrees over a decade. Our current average temperature has increased one degree since 1900. One. Look how worked up we are about it. Can you imagine 18 degrees in a decade? Holy hell!
Global Warming is a little more of a hot-button issue than I’d like to get into, but it got me thinking. My son is really interested in science and space right now, so why not something like that? Maybe the Large Hadron Collider or something. Maybe find something simple to study, like the sun. We made a date for the library for Saturday to dig deeper and find something cool to learn about.
I’m open to any suggestions as well. Hopefully this gets me out of the funk I’ve been in for the last couple of weeks.
