Re-examination of Purpose

I'm beginning to hate my job, which is something I haven't said in almost nine years. Nine years from the time I said I hated my job, printed out resumes, turned in my two weeks notice and began working where I currently work right now...

Every year during the firing squad, no blindfold provided hour to hour and a half allotment of time that is my review in front of my boss, my boss's boss, and the VP of our company, it's the same old story. Rate yourself from one to five. Five being exceptional and impossible to achieve, one being a warm body to fill an open chair and three being the grade you're most likely going to get because the middle ground is the safest place for any boss to peg you at without giving you credit for a job well done or saying he thinks you suck completely.

And every year I disagree with great enthusiasm to a grading system that believes anything over a three would be giving their employees way too much credit for doing exactly the jobs they were hired to do and do indeed do well, if not very well. Instead they temper their responses of what we hope will be a fair review and an appropriate wage increase with sentences that imply that with so much room for improvement, it would be a misappropriation of funds to give you that extra whatever percent above what they've already predetermined they were willing to give you, when they just don't think you're quite at that non-existent level just yet...

I could of course be wrong, but after nine years of surviving the inquest, I've learned that hard work, job pride, and company loyalty aren't guarantees when it comes to breaking through to the glass ceiling that for all intents and purposes has become my paycheck.

Despite this, and I do belive there are times when you have to say it out loud for all the world to hear, I know I do a damn fine job. I know I'm in the very top of the top tier for people with the same job as I. And I know that my customers think the world of me, will stay on hold forever just to talk to only me, and who in our years of doing business together, define the job I do with complimentary words.

Because that's what I do. I don't dick around and tell someone what they want to hear. I don't make excuses for mistakes that happen when they are without a doubt mine. I listen to what they have to say, solve their problem if I can, connect them to the right people if I can't, and give them the kind of customer service that quite honestly doesn't exist in all that many places anymore. And to me, what's most important is not the name of the company I work for, but the one the customer's know on a day-to-day basis every time I answer my phone and say hello.

Now with the time to take my place in the hot seat approaching once again, I ready myself to hit with points of fact and in my case perseverence. Armed as always with facts, figures, accomplishments and yes, even a few things that I know I still need to work a little bit harder on, to put on the proverbial table of judge me not for what you think I am, but for who I am and what you know I do.

And when they ask me this year that same old question that they have asked me every year, I know I cannot give the same response I've given since the first day I walked in their doors, a mere novice from the street. A response that has always been, "As long as I'm happy here, I'll be here."

The truth is, I'm just not happy with any of it anymore and I just can't imagine another year of trying to climb a ladder that I've lost all interest in climbing.