The fact that Dzuro could not answer the 38 questions put to him in response to his denigrative PIP was conveniently overlooked. In the perverse “logic” that one can only find in an organisation as divorced from reality as the UN; if Dzuro did a good enough character assassination with the Annual Appraisal, that would be the “evidence” that he did not need to answer any questions about the PIP because my work was so patently bad that he did not need to waste his time on such piffling trivialities.
Its a peculiarly UN corruption of the post hoc ergo proper hoc fallacy.
In this case, however, Dzuro had no alternative but to use my Annual Appraisal to condemn everything I had done in the past 12 months; if he didn’t, he would be leaving himself wide open to the accusation of abuse of authority and harassment.
Conflict of interest? Don’t be silly. The UN doesn’t recognise the concept, and if they don’t recognise the concept, it follows that none can exist…..
I pointed this out some six weeks before it happened. I was ignored.
I don’t normally claim the power to predict the future but you didn’t need to be Nostradamus to see that one coming.
Most people get an Annual Appraisal; that is maybe a page, a page and a half. I got one that ran to a rather impressive 24 pages, and – just as I had predicted – was the most comprehensive scalping since Little Big Horn. Moreover, not content with just going over the last 12 months, I got an Annual Appraisal which very generously stretched back into the previous year, and strayed into the following period as well.
I apparently ‘required development’ in absolutely everything EXCEPT technological awareness – which was possibly the biggest joke of all. Had I been given a bad rating for ‘technological awareness’ that would possibly have been very difficult to challenge ….. but nobody thought of that.
In short, and as predicted, the Appraisal redefined the word ‘egregious’.
Of course, if Dzuro had actually tailored his wrath in such a way that the Annual Appraisal actually supported the content of the PIP, that would actually lend some credence to his argument that the PIP was necessary. Such strategic thinking, sadly, is not apparent.
Instead, Dzuro simply used the “spray and pray” approach, not unlike an epileptic monkey with a machine gun and diarrhea; more concerned with generating noise and making a mess than actually substantiating anything with evidence that stood up to any degree of scrutiny.
In his enthusiasm to be so universally negative, Dzuro even contradicted what he had written about me in the mid-point comments, not that anyone in the UN understands the significance of a prior inconsistent statement, far less someone with “investigator” in his job title.
Dzuro’s concept of an investigation also ignores the fairly obvious difference between form and substance. According to him, my draft reports – which, by the way, are not called “draft” because of the wind that comes in under the door – were so bad that they required significant editing.
What was put forward as indicative of this gross incompetence on my part however was nothing but stylistic. I might write “the sky was clear blue” and Baldini – for whom the roles of ‘Case Manager’ and ‘Junior School English Teacher’ were sometimes difficult to differentiate – would change it to read “there was a clear blue sky.” What difference does it make?
If I wrote “there was a clear blue sky” she was just as likely to change that to read “the sky was clear blue.”
If the sky had been overcast, that might be a different matter, but it is simply not possible to draft anything in English in such a way that someone else cannot edit it, particularly if they feel they are not doing their job if they do not do so. The Lord’s Prayer, the Gettysburg Address and D.H. Lawrence’s rather illuminating description of Mellors antics with Lady Chatterley in the potting shed can all be edited by anyone inclined to do so. Stylistic changes can always be made and can never be prevented, because the English language is simply like that. It is not Pure Mathematics.
The UN, of course, found absolutely nothing wrong with this. All that mattered was that the tiniest and most insignificant detail be blown up out of all proportion so it portrayed me as the greatest investigative disappointment since Inspector Clouseau failed to find his own ass in the dark.
And so I went through the feculent composition that was my Appraisal, line by line, and prepared a comprehensive rebuttal that showed it to be… well… feculent.
Coming soon….