The Rating System

It's getting to be time for my annual rating.

Rating, not ranting. Ranting I do daily. Sometimes just quietly to myself so as not to wake other people.

So, once a year we get a nice little report on how our supervisor thinks we did. It has comments on how many times we were absent, whether or not we know our duties and are able to carry them out, professionalism, etc. Blah blah blah.

I've had three different supervisors in the last year. Actually six. We always get two sergeants. One for the week and a different one for the weekend. So I had two sergeants one evening shift when I left it. Then two more for eight months on day shift. And now that I'm back on evenings I have two different sergeants.

So, how did I do? And who is going to rate me? The sergeants I had the month before I went to day shift? The ones I had for eight months on day shift? Or the ones I've had for three months on evenings? I actually know who it is. It's the "weekday" sarge on evenings. He's a guy I've known the whole time I've been in the department. When he was just a lowly COI like me, we were pretty good friends. Now that he's my supervisor, things haven't changed all that much. I still give him crap all the time about his annoying little habits and he rides me about mine.

I've never really been very subtle in my social interactions. Either I will internalize something or I will blow it right into someones face. I get on peoples nerves. It's who I am and it probably won't ever change.

So what will my rating be? Personally, I don't care very much. No matter what it is, I will sign it and throw my copy away. A good rating won't get me any more money and a bad one won't get me fired or cost me any money. For the most part, the rating system is an exercise in annoyance for the supervisors and a waste of paper.

The system used to be fairly simple. A form that they filled out that said whether or not you showed up and did your job. A space to put in whether you had any problems that needed addressed. Now it's not so easy. Some long haired professor type sold the state a program for a bazillion dollars. It's ten times as complicated, takes ten times as long to do and produces exactly the same results. And it wastes more paper. Freaking brilliant. Your tax dollars at work.

And just on a personal note, why does the rating system only go in one direction? Who knows more about how the supervisors do their jobs than the people that work for them? If a sergeant or lieutenant or captain is a jackass to his underlings but a suckup to his bosses why should he get a good rating? You would think that, as important as our job is and how critical it is that it runs seamlessly, this kind of thing would be examined from all sides. I propose to implement a new system titled SRS or "Supervisory Rating System" that will include comment forms to be filled out on your chain of command from sergeant all the way up to the warden. And these forms, instead of passing up the chain here for editing, would bypass the institutional chain altogether and go straight to the directors office at the capitol.

Yeah, like that's gonna happen.

Dang, there goes my good rating for the year......