My Performance Review

On whether we get the raise.

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1.

Performance reviews were last week and as we watched each other stepping out with managers, one by one, everybody kept asking each other: “what’d they tell you? did you get it?”

There are four performance reviews in the year; only two in which we’re eligible for a 75-cent raise.

Every year it goes to fewer people than the last.

It is part of our managers’ job that they have to mention, during the review, where you’ve shown room for improvement.

Somehow it only makes people angry.

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2.

Two of the most-appreciated, hardest-working, longest-serving employees sat for their performance reviews last year and recieved their well-deserved raises but were told, in solemn tones, about how to improve.

They were so incensed by the feedback that they started talking in the breakroom. They were still angry and it was like when you hold two burning matches together and they form one taller fatter flame with some red in it. They walked together to the managers’ counter and put in their two weeks’ notice. They opened their Dayforce app and dropped their next ten shifts. Then they got back to work.

The story spread. Colleagues gasped and grinned. We scuttled and huddled and psst! Scandalized smiles and whispers. “They fuckin just quit!” Like Santa was here.

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3.

The most senior of the two employees was an older guy who was handsome and he worked at the store for the better part of a decade. But he was now married to a lawyer. It is a curious thing about the grocery store that most of the people working there over the age of 55 are indeed there because they want to be.

In the year since quitting the grocery store he pops in every few days, silk-shirted and coiffed, cheeks and lips and brows augmented with needles. He waves baubled hands. He walks with great posture.

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4.

During my last performance review I was reminded by a manager that I had come to work on two different days with torn jeans. The manager leaned back in his chair and folded his hands and looked at me like a spiritual leader. “Is there anyhting going on that you think might have caused that pattern?”

I said yes: I had torn them at work and on both occasions was called out before the end of the shift in which I’d torn them.

He touched one of his chins and nodded and said, “Alex. Lemme tell you a story.”

I said OK and he said once upon a time there was a woman who had been flagged for wearing torn pants. When he sat and addressed it with her she started to cry. She told him she only had three pair of pants and that she could not afford to buy a new pair nor even the time to do so.

He said to her, “Look. What size are you?” Then he and the other managers pooled some money. One of them drove to Target that day and bought her a pair of pants. When they stood together and presented her with the new pair of pants before the end of that same shift, he said, she was so overcome that she wept again.

“The reason I’m telling you all that,” he said, “is if it’s the money you’re worried about, or whatever it might be, just let us know. OK? We’re here to help.”

I thought it might be presumptuous to tell him that his own story means something completely different from what he believes so what I told him instead was “thank you” and in return he gave me 75 cents.

Coffee Shop, Railway Station — Indianapolis (1956)

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5.

Our current GM is very well liked. Her name is Caro and she is thirtysomething and five feet tall. She walks with a slouch and drinks her coffee with two hands. Instead of makeup she wears baggy sweaters with her hair in a bun and she pulls up the hood when she types.

I learned last month that Caro had just finalized her divorce and when I asked a younger colleague if he knew about it he said, “Bro are you kidding me,” and then he looked at Caro across the store and sucked his lip and shook his head, “it’s like the fuckin Hunger Games in here.”

Caro sat me down on a stool in the back hallway. It is very clean back here because a fire inspector popped in with confetti and bugles on her first day as general manager last year. He saw this hallway cluttered with boxes next to the fire escape and wrote her name at the top of a $5,000 fine. So now this hallway is very clean. The flourescent tubes are bright and make no noise. The floors are polished and the air is white citrus liminal. If you look straight down you’ll see your own face reflected back without features.

Caro recited like Miranda the three criteria by which my performance is evaluated. She said that, in all three categories, my performance was ranked as “Meets Expectations” which does not sound good but is in fact the highest achievement possible and for some reason I said “Thank you”.

She sighed after reading the Criteria off her laptop and congratulated me on the 75 cent raise that brings my wage up to $23. Then she said, “Just so you know: I see how hard you work and…” she listed some things that I do without being asked, “and I want you to know it doesn’t go unnoticed. OK?”

My job is silly and I’m ashamed of it and I resent it even more because sometimes they’ll take me aside and say some shit like this and my chin crinkles and my throat gets tight and I just nod nod nod.

She said I have room for improvement though and—with a sigh and sympathetic blink—she handed me a paper to sign: “You need to come to work more often.”

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