My Personal Vision

It's getting round to time for appraisals at work. We've all got a form to fill in and guidelines to the company's Performance Appraisal System. Apparently this is considered a good thing: "Purpose of the appraisal is to achieve a balance between your performance in your current role against your career aspirations and development needs."

I don't have career aspirations and development needs. All I want out of a job is something that gives me money to finance the things I like to do with my spare time. If it involves juggling numbers, so much the better, and since my current job does that, I'm fine. Perfectly happy. I don't want to develop. I'm sick and tired of being given promotions and pay rises, because whenever I am, I end up in management rather than number-crunching, which is what I'm good at and what I enjoy doing.

And the horrible jargon and psychobabble this thing uses gets on my wick no end. Not only do we need to focus on 'development objectives', but they need to be SMART:
 Specific
 Measurable
 Achievable
 Realistic
 Time-bound

With bullet points, for crying out loud. And it gets worse. The form itself has a whole freaking page about Personal Development and Mastery. It seems that 'The purpose of this exercise is to help you identify what personal goals you want to achieve that enable you to deliver your Personal Vision, and to understand how these overlap with the Company Vision and your departments goals.'

Capital letters for Personal Vision and Company Vision, just to stress what big, important concepts these are. And no apostrophe in 'departments'. I've got this from my dad, I know, but people who can't use an apostrophe right irritate me. My boss's grammar and punctuation are just awful, and it makes it hard to respect her like I should (she's not responsible for this appraisal thing, I should make it clear - we pay someone in human resources ridiculous amounts of money to come up with rubbish like this).

And I'm sorry, but I just don't think in terms like that sentence does. Has the rest of the world just gone mad? Does everyone else go around thinking "What can I do to enable me to deliver my Personal Vision?" One of the questions on this form is '2. What do I do, as your manager, that gets in your way' (without a question mark, I notice). I'll tell you anyway, manager. You make me go through stupid appraisal processes like this rather than letting me get on with my work. For Pete's sake.

Sorry, enough ranting for the moment. It's the weekend! Granted, a weekend that's mainly going to be occupied by a funeral, but that's better than worrying about my DEVELOPMENT OBJECTIVES (including Functional Capabilities & Management Skills)...