My First Performance Evaluation

At the pawn shop, each new employee is supposed to receive a performance evaluation after his or her first thirty days of employment. My first performance evaluation, however, did not occur until today--over three months late. I knew it had to be coming soon because I was given a self-evaluation last week and told to fill it out. That was an experience in and of itself. I tend to take things much more seriously than they actually are. What can I say? I'm a spaz. Especially when it comes to work and responsibilities. So, you can imagine the nervousness I felt when one of the first things that was said to me at work today was that my evaluation would be at 2:30 pm.

I spent the entire morning and early afternoon analyzing how well I've been doing my job, belittling myself for the seemingly endless string of mistakes I make, and agonizing over what I could and should be doing better. I even wondered if they would be letting me go and began to consider the places where I would seek employment if I was fired. Like I said. I'm a spaz.

The evaluation itself wasn't as horrible as I had thought it would be. I sat down with the boss of the pawn shop and another manager and compared the scores I had given myself on the self-evaluation to the scores they had given me. I was worried that I would score myself a lot higher than what my bosses would score me as, but, as it turns out, the scores weren't too far apart. I scored myself a little higher in some categories and there wasn't a single category in which they scored me higher than I did for myself, but that's okay. They offered suggestions where I could improve--paging other employees for help more promptly when there is a line of customers, offering suggestions for merchandise to management, helping make sure music is constantly playing through the PA system, etc. And then they offered me a raise. Naturally, that made me very happy. And after that, my boss asked me if I wanted to "continue forward".

I responded that I didn't understand what she meant by "continue forward". That's a phrase that holds a lot of connotation in the workplace, and I doubted I was supposed to read that much into it. What she explained was that they were thinking about assigning me to be personally responsible for a specific area of the store. They even asked me if I had a preference of which section I would be given responsibility for. I didn't. I was then told that if I did a good job with this added responsibility that there was an opportunity for another raise, and that sounded just fine with me. I should be getting my section assignment next week.

Beyond the anxiety leading up to the evaluation and the relief I felt during and after it, I found a really old penny today. A young man was buying a Playstation 3 controller and I was about to hand him his change of eight cents when he said that I could just keep it. Intending to put this generous tip into the "Take-A-Penny / Leave-A-Penny" thing, I noticed that one of the pennies looked strange. When I looked at the year, I discovered that it was from 1936. My first thought--"Holy crap! That's freaking old!" My second thought--"I'm taking that. It might be worth something."

I took the penny home, figuring that it was going to be put in the free penny bin anyway, and Google searched "worth of a 1936 penny". What I learned was that the common value of a circulated 1936 penny from Philadelphia (which is where this coin was minted) is three to five cents but that it can go also be valued as high as seventy-five cents. Oh, that fool who threw away that penny! He had no idea what he was dismissing as naught, and now it's mine! All mine!