Arontius of Bygelswade

.....I'm getting to have way too intimate a relationship with my desk at work. I sat down to it at 5:50AM this morning and left it at about 6:20PM this evening. I'd be more O.K. with that if I actually received payment for a twelve hour day. But officially, I only worked eight hours today, with the rest being a nice, fat donation to our beloved government. Yuck!

.....I think the part that is most frustrating is that when we took on a new manager a couple of months ago the workload was supposed to drop off as he took more on to his own plate. Unfortunately, we've just discovered that he is taking on everything that we've been avoiding over the past couple of years. And what he picks up the rest of us have to scramble to provide additional support of our own.

.....And I'm rather disgusted as part of the reason I ended up staying so late was that I ended up having to re-write part of my self-assessment for the NSPS Personnel System. The more I deal with that Bush-Cheney monstrosity, the more I hate it. I have spent dozens and dozens of hours, a lot of it on actual government time, writing about what a wonderful asset I am to the Federal Government. I submitted it to the online system earlier this week and washed my hands of it. Only to have the Mid-Level Boss send it back to me earlier day because he felt that I did not adequately portray my actions of the past year in my assessment. What's worse is that the reason he sent it back is that the review of my assessment would reflect, either for the good or the bad, on his own self-assessment as my supervisor, and that he felt that I needed to beef it up more. Holy Crap! How in the world is this overhaul of the government ratings system going to bring about more efficiency or a better workforce. I'm starting to count the days when the current regime leaves office!

.....Sigh! I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed, and a little frustrated. But I'm managing to hang on for the moment. I'd feel a lot worse except that I'm actually learning a lot in a short space of time. There is also that part of me that is just too damned stubborn to actual give up and take an easier way out. I'd just feel bad.

.....TBT made up for things though. :-) She called me up to check up on me and then took me out to dinner when I finally made it home. She listened to me whine until I was tired of whining, without telling me to shut up, or even sighing in boredom. She's a way cool lady. :-)

.....I struggled through my e-mail and now I'm in a zombie like state, watching in morbid curiosity one of the finale episodes of Project Runway. Hey, it's brainless.

.....It's time for bed! ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!!

.....Aaron / Arontius.

.....Yesterday was a rather long day in training. It was our brainwashing session of how wonderful the new Civil Service personnel system will be and how it is going to make our lives better. National Security Personnel System, NSPS, developed by our good friends Dick Chenney and Donald Rumsfeld (who CERTAINLY have our best interests at heart).

.....The system is rather complicated, but is supposedly geared towards rewarding those who work hard and well, and punishing those who cost the agency in terms of money, schedule, injuries, etc. Essentially it works by combining the normal increases in wages that one would see in the course of a year (Cost of Living, Step Increases within Grade, Special Incentive Awards, etc.) and combines them into a pool of money. That pool is divided amongst a group of people in the form of 'shares' as either wage increases or outright cash bonuses. The number of shares you receive based on your ratings for the year.

.....On the surface it sounds nice, but I am troubled by how easy it is to abuse the system. For one thing your ratings now become incredibly important. Those ratings are now based on a complicated system of self-assessment, supervisor assessment, group assessment and administrator agreement. The self-assessment has to be filled with objectives agreed upon by yourself and your superior and aligned with the overall 'goals' of the shipyard. They are not easy to write, and full of land minds. If you write objectives for yourself that you quickly realize are difficult at best to achieve, you are proverbially screwed at the end of the year.

.....I worry most about those with little to no writing skills as well. I spent a year or so in the Training Department at the Shipyard. There were a rather large number of people whose reading comprehension level was negligible at best. There were even a few where we had to call them up into the office separate and basically read the material to them, their reading skills being that minimal. Some of these people were absolutely fantastic supervisors and managers, getting the job done and taking good care of their employees. But when they have to sit down and start writing self-assessments, hmmmm...

.....The rewards system also strikes me as a giant pyramid scheme. For those performers who excel, someone has to fail so that those good performers get those bonuses paid to them out of the pool. Now this seems on the surface to not be a bad thing (those who do good should be rewarded, those who do bad should not), but I could quite easily see a time where it would make management look good to start implementing a quota system. You have this many star employees, this many goods, this many marginals, etc. But, of course, the minute that happens, SOMEONE has to start receiving those undesirable marks. Which means no increases in salary for them. But what is worse is that under NSPS rules, the ability to terminate negatively performing workers becomes easier. Which sounds wonderful on the surface, but with quotas, not so much. See my worry? Why go through the stress and bother of a RIF when you could quota your way out of a couple of hundred workers just by giving them negative ratings.

.....I didn't leave class at the end of the day with a good feeling, which was made worse by the phone call I received as I was leaving gate. Seems the Big Boss had pulled some strings and had my office moved downstairs closer to his. This was something that was in the works for a while, but I had been dragging my feet a little. They waited until I was gone and WHAM, made the move happen. Next week is going to be interesting.

.....O.K., it's out of my system now. I'll stop whining for a while. :-)

.....Aaron / Arontius.