Saturday Grab Bag Rises From The Ashes

In addition to the anti-climactic resolution of my project at work, this week I also was required to do an online self-evaluation for my annual review process. I put this off as long as possible because I really loathe that part of the process, but when I finally set myself to it I just decided to go whole hog and talk up how freaking awesome I am. (I did not at any point, in the corporate webform, actually type the words "freaking awesome". I now sort of wish I had.) For the vast majority of the current phase of my so-called career, I've been exceedingly lucky in terms of managers and supervisors. Not only have they been generally competent, making Doing My Job inherently easier, but I've been able to establish decent enough personal rapport with them that annual reviews never freaked me out; I knew my supervisor was looking out for me and would say good things about me and advocate for me to get a raise because, at the end of the day, they basically liked me (and also because I was adequately competent at my job and made Them Doing Their Job inherently easier, which is some nice reciprocity I suppose).

This year is a bit different, however, as my old contract went away in the May/June timeframe and I started on a new project working for a supervisor who's pretty much all-business (former miltary) and who I never saw for the first few months because I was working at corporate instead of on-site for the government client. So this time around I couldn't rely on my supervisor liking me and/or being well familiar with the quality of my work output; my self-assessment could very well end up being the main source of information used in evaluating me, for lack of any other evidence. So I checked off "Exceeded Expectations" in pretty much every category. My supervisor is of course still free to disagree with that, but maybe it will get rubber stamped. Worth a shot.

I'll let you all know how it goes if I remember to do so, but the thing about huge corporations like my employer is that the whole annual review process (which is company-wide, with everyone doing it at once, rather than on your actual hiring anniversary) literally takes about three months from start to finish. Some time in April I should get the official results of my self-aggrandizement.

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Speaking of humility or lack thereof ... when I was growing up in New Jersey customized license plates were a relatively rare sight, mainly because the DMV charged seriously higher prices to register them. We called them "vanity license plates" with a certain shocked sensibility imparted to the word "vanity" - clearly these were frivolous indulgences for people who had more money than they knew what to properly do with. That was just the norm in my circumscribed universe (where you also couldn't pump your own gas and keychains inscribed with "My car insurance cost more than the car" were funny because they were true) and when I went away to college in Virginia I was astonished by the preponderance of vanity plates (or, as they call them hereabouts, "just license plates") on the roads, although the astonishment quickly dwindled once I learned that getting custom tags in VA costs a mere pittance. I've further learned, in the years since, that while a New Jerseyan generally needed to have something really clever or really important (read: self-aggrandizing) to say in seven characters or less to justify the expense, a Virginian would think nothing of getting an absolutely vacuous custom tag, almost as if they felt compelled to put something down on the registration form because blank tags are not street legal, and forgot that the DMV would oblige them with random letters and numbers as a default. Hence the phenomenon of seeing a PT Cruiser with a custom tag reading "PT CRUZR". (Yes, really.) I grew up thinking that vanity plates were an luxury-class form of expressive communication, but Virginia has done its level best to subvert that assumption.

Still, for all the inane and redundant tags all around me, I do occasionally see some good ones. (For some value of "good", which in this case is "weird enough to give me a moment or two's pause".) A couple from around town, post-move: someone who tends to be commuting east around the same tmie as me int he morning has the tag "KND 1337". Which I suppose means that the driver is ... kinda elite? It's also possible that the letters are initials, thus making the tag more like a business card: "Kevin N. DuPlessy, l33t h4xx0r." If I ever see this guy at the gas station I may very well ask him. Less ambiguous was a white Mustang sporting "GSTA VIP" tags. I have no doubt that the bastion of respect behind the wheel is considered a very important person amongst the gangster community ... I'm just not entirely sure what constitutes said community way out in the boonies where he rolls.

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One thing about hardcore geeks that's fairly universal is that all of us have thought at one time or another about inhabiting the imaginary worlds in which our entertaniments are set. To a certain extent that includes pretending to be Superman or Luke Skywalker or Bo Duke (from the imaginary world where a Dodge Charger can fly over any obstacle like it was shot out of a cannon) but the exceptionally over-invested geek will as often as not come up with their own character who would fit into the environment in question. Granted, coming up with a compelling superhero of one's own is more work than daydreaming about being Spider-Man, but on the one hand geeks don't really shy away from putting effort into their fandom, nor do they mind complicating matters (in fact, as I've insisted before, I'm pretty sure that's an active preference). And on the other hand, it inherently frees up all kinds of new possibilities. Only three neighborhood kids can run around the cul-de-sac playing Batman and Robin and Batgirl, so the kid who invents Batbot and throws himself into playing that part has made room for himself in an otherwise closed system. (Also, that kid might really wish he were a robot, which might bear investigating by someone concerned with the kid's emotional future, but that's neither here nor there.)

Geeks eventually outgrow insisting that their Big Wheel is the Batcycle ... well, not so much the insistence as that they physically outgrow the Big Wheel, so they move on to writing fanfiction or playing roleplaying games or whathaveyou, but the same drive to explore persists, and sticking to the perspective of an established character can be rewarding but is also somewhat limiting. Imagine yourself as Fox Mulder and you're pretty well tied to ambiguous romance with Scully and trying to track down abduction-happy aliens (or you sever those ties but then you're really not being true to the character). But as a new FBI agent assigned to the X-Files, you can make the whole supernatural-infused world your sandbox, and that's a game with some possibilities, overlaid on some comfortably familiar ground rules.

As you can imagine, I think about stuff like this a lot, and I come up with so many ideas for games and whatnot that I will never actually be able to realize them all if I win the lottery and never have to work again and live to be 100. (Which, of course, I wish for very fervently.) The latest example would be to have some adventures in the Star Wars universe as a hyperactive, easily distracted astromech droid (the model represented by R2-D2) expressing itself mostly through that "oooOOOOooohhh" modulation which expresses wonderment and sounds like it should end with " ... shiny!" I would of course name this little droid A3-H3, because I love puns based on neurobehavioral developmental disorders.


(And yes, I realize I'm ending here not only with an excruciating pun but with an assertion that I want to be a robot, but I assure you this does not reflect a deep-seated desire to turn off my emotions. Astromechs are just awesome is all.)