Golly

I got my annual review today and, not surprisingly, it's quite the comedown from last year, when I was dressed as Dumbledore and got "straight A's" - this year there were no costumes (it wasn't Halloween) and I got a C+ average. Hmmm. Obviously, my boss is still unhappy about me. The reprimand wasn't enough. The besmirching of my twenty-year federal record was not sufficient payback for my clerical faux pas. Can it really be that every single aspect of my performance has plummeted like so much Goldman Sachs stock? Well.

I've never had a boss who was willing to sideline my career out of spite. No surprise as far as she is concerned, of course. It's me who's been trying to sell her as a reasonably compassionate person to all the rest of the people in the office who uniformly detest her. "No, really, she's not that bad!" I say. "She just comes on strong and she has a hearing problem, so she seems curt and mean." Hahaha. The joke's on me. I was so damned invested in having her - gulp - love me that I rationalized away her true nature. If I were a more cagey person, I would've seen from the start that I had to be playing cover-my-ass, not show-them-your-talent.

The lessons keep on a'comin'. I am not my appraisal. C's on the report card do not a C student make, necessarily, and so what if I'm a C student? If this whole damned thing has taught me anything, it's that I've been bluntly reminded that I'm human, I'm fallible, and things can come tumbling down regardless of the effort expended or the hope wished. My my my. Whatever happy bubble of self-delusion I floated in, it's popped now.

And besides, the whole boss/secretary relationship, at least when I'm the secretary, is a sad little replay of the Make-Mommy-Happy dance that, come to think of it, didn't even work way back when I was doing it the first time through. Jesus, about to turn 50 and still giving a shit about some oversized Mommy character's opinion of me. I cast this play myself with a D-list actor in the role of supreme being. I shouldda held out for Streep. Shit!