It's that time of the year :P

Well, Well, it's that time of year again :P didn't get it? Let me give you some clues:

1. All your colleagues are extra nice to you.

2. All employees in the company are at their behavioural best.

3. Everyone is on time to office and "willingly" stay back most of the time to finish some new found pending work :P

4. No one takes a single day's leave.

5. Everyone is buttering up to their managers and Bosses :P

No, it's not start of Valentine season in office! (Wish there was one!:P) It's the Annual Appraisal time! It's time for IT Slaves to be on their best behaviour and in the good books of their bosses, lest their appraisal becomes a joke. Suddenly all pending works are tended to and resolved in record time, various reports start to flow to bosses, which had stopped exactly one year back :P Then comes the D Day of filling up the appraisal form. You will have to fill up your entire year's achievements in one column :P not a difficult task for many coz they would have hardly achieved anything :P But to hardworkers like me (just being modest here :P) it takes quite a bit of effort to squeeze it all in to a box. Then there is the dreaded, what i call, "Honesty tick boxes". You will have to choose/rate yourself on how good you are as a team player, how good you are when it comes to interpersonal skills.

You have to choose between 1 to 5 and rate yourself, the gentleman's agreement is not to rate yourself more than 4 and less than 3 for ANY of the options :P Coz your boss will ALWAYS rate you one grade lesser than what you have rated yourself :P Noobs and colleagues who have kept changing companies every year, who have never filled appraisal forms need to be guided by you to fill in the form as they are flummoxed by the endless categories of disection :P Finally when you do manage to complete all the sheets and send that mail to your manager with your appraisal form attached, you are just half way through. The dreaded waiting period begins :P

Now on, you are extra cautious, extra nice to everyone:P, you take temporary political sanyas from office politics :P and wait for the day when out of the blue, you will be informed by manager to drop in to the cabin for "discussions" you go with your heart in your mouth, you notice the envelope on the table, if you were me, you would already know how much you got (not how much you deserve :P, you never what you deserve, life is not fair, remember? :P) Your bosses then talk and talk and talk, the envelope seems to have been forgotten, you suddenly realise that bosses have plans for your future, they have plans for your well being, plans, which will make you a better contributor to company. Notice that there is no talk of the dirty word "monitory compensation" Then your boss thrusts you the envelope and conveniently gets on to an "important" phone call. You open the envelope, with expectations, you can almost visualise your family budget in it :P

You take out the letter and read. Read it again, it looks like last year's appraisal letter, oh no, wait, the date is correct, hmm, there seems to be a fine change in some numerals somewhere, but in the end the CTC seems to have jumped by quite a few numbers, now where did all that money go! You read the fine prints and resign to your fate, your monthly take home is gonna be almost same, your tax bracket has increased, you will be paying Mr chidambaram more and that's about it! You are dejected and question yourself, is this what i slogged my ass for? suddenly, all the earlier talk of plans for your future starts to feel like fake words, your plans to buy that new tv, bike/car have to be shelved. You wait to talk to boss, but no, he's engrossed in the phone, you wait and wait.

Finally walk out of the cabin accepting your fate. Sounds familiar? Was inspired by one of my appraisals :P But seriously though, i think the appraisal shouldn't be an once a year ritual, the self development and reviews and other blahs blahs have to be done periodically so that the actual ritual doesn't become a mundane money expecting task. People should feel really good after appraisal and not like they got shot in their chest! :P

Few cartoons which sum up the mood :P