Well, I’m a little embarrassed. Yesterday I got an email asking me to write some bullets for my annual review. I hate doing those, and I was truly busy, so I put it off. I just got a phone call, thankfully from the one NOT doing the review, asking me to get on it, since merit increases are tied to my review.

So I did it, but it was hard. I can do the techno-babble, but writing that shit about myself is hard. Last year wasn’t really too bad, since I actually had a pretty big accomplishment in taking over my superior’s job. Without the associated pay increase, of course. But this year has been really boring. I’m still doing both jobs, but the work here has slowed down so much that both of them don’t honestly add up to a full time job. I’m trying to keep myself valuable, or at least to look like it, but I wouldn’t keep me full time. Appearance is everything.

I have a couple of things going for me though. It’s a satellite office. I’ve only been to my home office once, and that was for the interview. Luckily, I met my supervisor, who wasn’t that at the time, and we hit it off real well.

The nice thing about working on my own is actually working on my own. But the part that sucks is that they really have no idea what I do all day. Which is a plus most of the time, but come evaluation time, they expect me to write my own review. For a raise. And I have no idea what other people do there to measure myself against.

One thing nice is that I do work here with a guy who subcontracts to my company, and they’re calling him too. He’s really great to work with; one of those rare extremely intelligent people who is also successfully human. He’ll probably back me up.

I do need to be here even if I am bored most of the time because in September there won’t be any one else at that level. I get to hold the whole local bag. That should justify my existence.

I tried to word that into my self-review. Yeah, I’d really like a raise for not doing much of anything. The company does get to bill me full time—not everyone in it is billable. Companies like billability. And I went over the basic stuff again, but with more flowery language than last year.

Hope it works. Hope they don’t see right through me and fire me on the spot.