Once a year, at my wife’s office, comes the dreaded Performance Employee Appraisal System, the whole office is severely affected for the entire several weeks during this stressful time period, where a ton of paperwork has been filled out and then the employee gets pulled into the manager’s office and given the news of whether or not, and how well or not, you are doing your job, based on some type of numerical rating system that differs from company to company.

These annual reviews can play a critical role in a person’s career, like in how much money that they will hopefully continue to keep making. It helps determine the percentage of the next anticipated salary increase, if any, as well as if any additional training is needed. Maybe a promotion or another position would and/or could be factored into it as well. And of course if there is any discipline necessary, for things like attendance issues or any other negative interferences that too would be considered.

In the past, and for many years, possibly even today, a few select employees have been asked to do the task of rating themselves at this time. Something that would be a very difficult challenge to ask of anyone. My wife has been asked to do this several times thruout the years that she has worked at this company. She becomes a nervous wreck, absolutely frightful. To have to ask yourself with complete honesty, and being as modest a woman as some people like my wife tend to be,just “ What kind of employee am I? ”, is a heavy burden indeed.

Thank the people in charge because this year her company has put into place a workplace management tool from a company by the name of managerassistant.com that is programmed to ease the stress related to employee appraisal. The buzz in the office is that it is a wonderful program that will help eliminate much of pressure and prejudice that often accompanies such evaluations.

A friend of mine called today to ask if I’ve been having any problems with a computer program about virus infections. Well seeing as I’ve been offline for awhile due to my being so busy of late with the business end of things, I went ahead and logged on to my account, or should I say, tried to log on. It appears that the antivirus protection program going by the name of ANTIVIRUS XP 2008, has embedded itself into my computer as well. I have as yet been unable to either access the program itself or to erase it from my hard drive. Brings me to believe that the program itself may be a virus or some kind of password stealer that may have been injected into an e-mail or perhaps as an attachment on some site I may have visited. There is no record of my having downloaded anything in over a month or two, so I’m at wits end to figure it out at this point. I’m going to cal one of those geek squads to see if they can get to the bottom of it. I may have to can the whole hard drive at this point and start all over again. I do too much online to have to put up with such nonsense as this.