Forgotten Beatitudes

Back before I embarked on a wonderful career as a primary caregiver for an ailing family member and a freelance writer, I dreaded annual reviews.  Each year, I would sit down at my crystal ball computer and agonize over my goals and plans for the coming year.  After the Earth had made it’s treacherous trip around the Sun, the boss and I would pull out these goals and evaluate them like I was some sort of corporate Nostradamus in order to decide how big a raise I got, if any.  On the downside, I rarely made all my goals, usually due to the fact that whatever job I was holding at the time had a tendency to change description about half way through the year.  However, I did predict the whole “Hisler” problem being big in Germany.

Some people actually got fired on the basis of their annual evaluations, which was always awkward as it felt like they were given the rope to hang themselves with.  The point is, though, that there was accountability: the judgment of your success was based on the criteria you yourself set up and if you didn’t live up to your goals, then there were consequences.

I say this because an assessment of the troop surge in Iraq is due later this week in Congress and, as you’ve probably heard, the Iraqi government has failed to meet all of the 18 benchmarks set out for it.  The White House is spinning this like a top on acid, with Tony Snow telling us how the troops have only gotten into place and we can’t expect real progress to be made yet.

Now Snow and the White House seem to be changing gears…sort of.

With the crumbling of GOP support, the White House is going to start pushing a “post-surge” strategy.  It seems odd that Snow would be saying, “Hey, the surge troops just got there, so we can’t consider the surge a failure yet because it just started now, six months after it was begun,” one day and then virtually the next day Bush is rolling out the “post-surge” strategy at a town hall meeting in Cleveland.   It’s not as strange as one might think, though, as the “post-surge” strategy seems to basically consist of adding the word “new” to the same battle plan.

Really, this is sort of equal parts obvious and brilliant.  How many people across the country could have saved their jobs by saying at their annual reviews, “Look, I know I didn’t meet my review goals this year because I spent far too much time playing Diamond Mine online and sending out emails about rich Nigerian widows who want to give away their money, but really, I don’t think you’re taking my post-review strategy into account.  I’ll still be playing Diamond Mine and sending out emails, but I’ll be playing new games of Diamond Mine and sending out new emails.”

Honestly, though, I think any review that went like that would end with, “No, I don’t think you have to call security as I’ll see myself out.”

Unless, of course, you’re the President of the United States and can come up with brilliant grammatical masterpieces like failure just being “A victory that hasn’t happened yet.”  Then people seem to actually buy into the idea that the “post-surge” strategy will truly be “the beginning of a new way” in Iraq, even while you are loudly stating that there will be no major changes in the war strategy.

So, in an appalling way, I sympathize with Bush on this.  I didn’t make my goals and benchmarks and wanted to blame it on the fact that my specific job duties were always changing.  I see a lot of that in Iraq, the mission is constantly changing because it was initially poorly defined and planned for and with that much flux it is impossible to set goals, let alone meet them.

I would like to offer a bit of advice, however.  The best thing I ever did was quit (and by quit, I mean, “Beat them to the punch and leave seconds before they got rid of me for remarking on how inappropriate it was for a national non-profit to throw away around $50,000 in donor dollars on a payroll system that didn’t work and, to this day, doesn’t work and was primarily only bought because the woman in charge of I.T. had hopes of banging the tech from the software contracting company peddling this piece of pornographic code swill).  The first couple of months were rough and it’s still rough, several years on now, but I got through it and I get through it.  Freelancing means my future is uncertain, but it was uncertain before and, at least now, I’m not automatically set up to fail by a boss that uses me as a stop-gap for whatever dam has recently sprung a leak.