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)...

Legal queries with Horace

Every week, Horace Fish, a man with various fraudulent legal credentials, answers your questions about the law.

Dear Horace

My neighbour recently broke into my house and stole my television set and antique sculpture of Cleopatra fighting Napoleon. I have also seen him shooting dolphins in his back garden, mowing the lawn and eating 'Birmingham confectionery'. Do I have any legal recourse against him?

Gavvvin Trelllllis

Gavvvin - due to a loophole in the law, a person is legally entitled to steal his next-door neighbour's television. And while the consumption of 'Birmingham confectionery' is of course illegal, the police are unlikely to do anything about it unless they've really got nothing better to do. Your best chance of getting your neighbour banged up is with the dolphins - although it is perfectly legal to shoot the things in your own garden, to do so outside the boundary of your home carries a minimum sixty-year prison sentence. I suggest that you go round to his house in the middle of the night and move the garden fence so that the dolphin pond lies on the other side of it.

Dear Horriss

My employer has recently given me the sack, claiming among other things that I 'treat sausages as if they were cuboid rather than cylindrical'. I don't even know what that would involve, and I fail to see how that could have any bearing on my job as a street sweeper. Do I have the right to take my boss to court and/or throw a brick through his window?

Gottfried Wheelbarrow

Gottfried - my name isn't spelt that way, you fat berk. What is wrong with you? Can't you read? What's the point me replying to your stupid letter if you can't even read? Get lost, and don't ever write to me again. In answer to your question, you do have the legal right to take court action, or smash up to three of your boss's windows, whichever would give you more satisfaction. I would recommend court proceedings, because although there is no chance of you being awarded any kind of compensation, your employer might be embarrassed into apologising for the comment about sausages.

It's at times like this that I consider getting Sky Sports

Admittedly that isn't a feeling I have very often - I've got more TV channels than anyone needs already, although I could always do with more cartoons. But there's a really good football match going on at the moment between Arsenal and Juventus, and I can't watch it without going out to the pub, and I can't be bothered to do that.

If I did splash out on Sky, I'd hardly watch the sports. A football match here and there, and maybe a bit of wrestling (I've become quite a WWE fan lately, thanks to Paul O'Brien's previews of every PPV. Paul is one of those people who can write about anything and make it compelling and entertaining. But reading those and then the WWE website to see what happens is as far as my fanhood goes at the moment. It might be good to actually watch a show some time and see what it's like.

And yay, Arsenal are through to the semis! And also yay, a court has thrown out Time Warner's attempts to claim that Smallville doesn't infringe Superboy's copyrights and therefore they don't have to pay Jerry Siegel's estate any money. I know I try to avoid just commenting on news stories here, but I'm very happy with both of those.

Alas, poor bike

A few months ago, the bit that holds the rear wheel in place went missing off my bike. I don't know if someone was trying to steal it but gave up halfway, or if it just fell to pieces the way my bikes generally do, but rather than doing anything about it I kept riding it around in faith that my weight on the saddle would hold the wheel where it should be. And it worked fine up till tonight, when the stress on the axle finally bent it to such an extent that the wheel won't turn round any more. At this point even I have to admit defeat and concede that the bike isn't rideable.

This is a great inconvenience, because it means walking to work from the train station, which means having to get the earlier train so as to arrive on time, which means getting up half an hour earlier. And I don't know when I'm going to have the time to get a new bike, either, what with the funeral on Saturday and everything. It's a real drag, all round, and not just in the literal sense of the only way to move my bike from A to B with a non-working wheel...

Thinking

I'm going about my everyday life, but I still find myself thinking about my dad all the time. Kind of makes it difficult to think of a subject for tonight's blog, so I'll just leave it at that.

Okay, I've been googling myself again

And yes, there are many more useful and productive things I should be doing with my Sunday afternoon. But I was deeply fascinated by this page.

Notice the 'Prime Numbers' section halfway down the page:

Prime numbers

3 – Number of plague-infected mice that a New Jersey biomedical research center says cannot be accounted for

32.13 – Number of seconds required by Ben Pridmore to memorize a shuffled sequence of 52 playing cards without error, a world record

14 – Number of new nuclear power stations China plans to build in the next 28 years

104 – Number of commercial nuclear power plants in United States, the last licensed in 1996

0 – Number of applications pending for new American nuclear plants

So... is there a reason why the writer felt that I fit in with the rest of these statistics? Am I the kind of person you naturally associate with plague-infected mice and nuclear power?

Sheffield Regional

I'm not sure why they still call the othello tournaments 'regionals'. They don't really represent any particular region, except in as much as they're all in different towns randomly scattered around the country. Anyway, I went to the Sheffield one today.

Missed the train I was intending to get because my bike had a flat tyre and I spent too long dithering over whether to go back upstairs, find my pump and fix it, or walk to the station. I walked in the end, but not quickly enough. I still got there before a couple of the other players, though, which was lucky because it gave us a moment to clear up a potentially awkward situation - Rob Stanton, the organiser, had been under the impression that I still live in Boston, and had told the owners of the building we were using to send an invoice to my old address.

The tournament took place in a strange little church-hall-style building called the Heeley Institute, somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Sheffield. There were nine of us in all, when Aidan had managed to find the place halfway through the first round. I won my first couple of games against Rob and Aidan, which gave me great aspirations of winning the whole tournament and becoming a worldwide celebrity, but then lost three in a row against Geoff, Phil and Steve Rowe (whose surname wasn't meant to be a pun there), which rather squished those dreams. Phil had meanwhile been kicking every available ass and was winning in a very impressive kind of way.

We went for lunch after the third round, finding on the third attempt a pub that was both open and serving food. The people of Heeley obviously aren't keen on pub lunches. But it was a lovely day - summer's on the way! Apart from the occasional torrential downpour, of course, but they only lasted a few seconds before the sunshine took over again.

Anyway, back at the Institute, my impressive losing streak was enough to get me a bye in round six. Rob beat Phil, which put Phil level with Geoff on five wins, and after the final round they ended up sharing first place. Joel Blackmur (who, in a longstanding othello tradition, I avoided being drawn against) came third, and I survived an extremely complicated endgame to beat Roy 33-31 and end up joint 4th with Steve. So it could have been a lot worse.