Story of my Life

Chances blown
Nothing's free
Longing for what used to be
Still it's hard
Hard to see
Fragile lives, shattered dreams

These words perfectly describe my professional life so far. Just to get you guys up to speed, I am currently working in a mining MNC in Australia. Fresh out of college, I took this jobs and came to work in the plant with huge dreams and expectations. At the same time, the company had huge expectations from me as well. Some might even say that those expectations were a tad bit unrealistic. Anyways, my company has a system called work performance review, in which performance of the employees is judged based on certain criterion set by their managers. My ex-boss had set a few parameters based on which he was going to judge my performance. At the time when these criterion were being set I was new to the company and did not object to the fact that most of the expectations were out of my control and were measuring the performance of the plant instead of my individual performance. And now that has come back to bite me in the ass big time. Over the past few months, the plant has fallen into dire straits and as a wise once man said "the shit has hit the fans". S0 deep is the abyss to which the plant has fallen that everyday our biggest challenge is to somehow keep the plant running for another day. Productivity, efficiency have all been thrown out of the window, we are all fighting to keep our heads above the water here with the corporate sharks circling us, waiting to tear our heads off. Amidst all this turmoil, my work performance review has been set to be done in the coming week. Last week my boss came to my office and informed me about it and asked me to do the self assessment that employees have to do before their bosses do the final review. I said right-o boss, I'm on it. But at that moment I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach that I am in for a walloping.

So I sat down on my desk, opened up my expectations page and started going through them. I looked at the first one and thought "this doesn't look too good. Let me start from the next one and come back to this at the end." So I moved onto the second one. Again that didn't look too good. So I moved over to the next one. 15 minutes later, I had gone over the whole list and was staring at a total score of 0%. It said to myself "This doesn't look right. Maybe I was being too hard on myself. Let me try again." So I went over the list once more, this time looking for loopholes that would allow me to get a respectable score. After fretting over the list for 5 minutes, I came up with a score of 25%. Just to give you a relative measure of my despair, 100 - 125% is above expectation performance, 75 - 100 % is a good performance, 50 - 75% is an average performance and anything less than that is serious under performance. I was devastated. My first job and first performance review was going to send me in throes of depression. I went to my boss and told him that I did my review and I got a score of 25%. And I cheated! He said "I know how you feel. All of us got a score of 0 ourselves. Don't worry about it."
Well that's easy for him. He has been working here for years now and these reviews don't matter too much to him. But to someone in my position, they are career making or career breaking stats. What am I going to say in an interview "Hey I got a score of 0 in my performance review. But believe me I am a very professional worker. You can't find anyone better than me." Can you get a sense of hypocrisy in that statement. I am not a cynic, but the future doesn't look too bright to me. The Kid's aren't all-right.