Here at the ISS, we occasionally get e-mails. Some of them compliment us for our continual destruction of all that is good and noble in the world. Some are from superheroic douchebags who don't get us.
And some of them ask us for genuine help. Here, a wage slave asks about gaming the system.
LM wrote:
Honestly, I don't get this whole "one year review" idea to begin with.
I mean, if you're doing your job adequately well, you get to keep it. If you screw up really badly, then you get fired (or, if you work for the Society, as we now call it, all your blood is removed). If you save the company or something, your pay gets doubled. That seems simple enough.
Do they really have to schedule some kind of meeting or evaluation exactly a year after you started to see if those things happened or not? I mean, you would think your bosseseses would know how you were doing your job since they, I don't know, work where you do and all.
Anyway, now that I've completely demonstrated my lack of understanding of the business world, here are some tips for you to have greater success in it and get a bigger raise:
1. Threaten to kill your bosses.
Now, I know this may not seem like the best idea in the world. I understand that. But listen to my logic here. We can reasonably assume that your bosses don't want to die, right? So, if you threaten to kill them, you'll be putting them in a situation that they probably don't want to be in. This will give you the upper hand, because only you will have the ability to give them relief in this uncomfortable circumstance. That is, if they give you what you want.
I'm sure you're thinking, "But won't they just fire me after the ordeal is over? Or worse, press charges?" Not if you negotiate well enough. If the entire season of "24" I watched this weekend is any indication, the only way to get people to do much of anything is to either torture them or threaten their or their family's lives. Seriously, trust me on this. I'm your Kiefer Sutherland, LM. Listen to my silky-smooth, yet gravelly voice of reason. This will work.
2. Feign abject poverty.
For the week or so before your evaluation, wear increasingly tattered clothes to work. Cough occasionally and mumble about how you might have cholera. Discuss with your co-workers, particularly your bosses, about how little you've had to eat that day. These stories can crescendo over time from a little comment about how all you've had is a fun-size Snickers to a comically tragic story of how you tried to eat a boot a la Charlie Chaplin in "The Tramp."
When someone asks you how things are going, tell them, "Oh, I'm fine," but then look away, biting your lip in such a way that everyone knows you have too much pride to say you can't make the rent. Then, just to make sure, look the person in the face and say, "Actually, I'm not fine. I can't make the rent, because I am very poor."
Work everyone's sympathy up to the point that they can't help but give you a huge raise. You know the feeling of accomplishment people get because they sent thirty bucks over the course of the year to a starving kid in Africa? That's the feeling you want to give people here. Have some flies go around with you everywhere, that'll help.
3. Adopt some kids.
Only as a temporary measure, mind you. Just bring them to the office one day. The smaller and cuter they are, the better. Tell everyone the daycare was closed and you didn't have the cash to hire a nanny. You really only have to do this once to see the money start to flying in.
The next day, it's right back to the orphanage with them. Keep in mind, however, there is one ethical concern in this situation. You may have to lie to your co-workers later on about how well little Brandon is doing in school. You have to say he's doing great, but trust me, he's a moron.
4. Snitch.
Surely there's someone in your office who's doing something that your bosses wouldn't approve of. Probably a lot of people. So tell on them. There's no way this could possibly backfire on you. Your bosses will appreciate your candor and loyalty, and the co-worker you snitch on, sometime down the road, will realize the error of his or her ways, find you, and thank you for helping him or her through this dark time, possibly with a lovely card or pleasantly arranged fruit basket.
In the event that nothing lurid is going on in your office (and, seriously, somebody's gotta be fudging on their time card), just go ahead and make something up. Not only does this work just as well as if you were telling the truth -- the person will still say, "But I didn't do anything!" when they're being dragged off to employee prison, which makes them look guilty as hell whether they did anything or not -- it also allows for greater creativity. So just talk about how Janine from accounting has a machine that controls the weather or how Steve from marketing has secret meetings with Satan, Osama bin Laden and the damned soul of Joseph Goebbels, as well as other non-company people, during office hours.
5. Make insane promises.
Offer to work like, 130 hours a week. Tell them you can have that project you've been working on for next January done in seven minutes. Tell them a raise in your pay will be the first step in saving their immortal souls. Tell them the wars in Iraq and Vietnam will be erased from history with your gigantic raise.
Tell them anything, really. Once the dotted line is signed, you can just go right back to your desk and read crummy blogs for the rest of the day and forget about all that crap you said. Odds are, they'll probably forget about it too. Seriously. They'll be so scared of your apparent schizophrenia, they'll do just about anything to get you out of their office.
