The laminate on the table is cold under my forearms. Not just cool, but a deep, indifferent cold that seems to be actively drawing warmth out of me. My manager, David, isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at his monitor, his eyes scanning a document that has my name at the top. The server rack in the corner hums a steady, monotonous B-flat, a sound I’ve come to associate with institutional dread. He clears his throat, a dry little scrape, and begins the ritual.

‘Okay, so, looking at Q4… excellent work on the Banner Project. Really turned that around.’

He smiles. It’s a genuine smile. He’s a decent person. That’s what makes this so much harder. The Banner Project concluded 15 days ago. It consumed the last month of my life, a frantic push of late nights and strained logistics. It was, by all accounts, a success. It is also the only thing he mentions with any specificity.

My work in February, the complete overhaul of the client intake system that reduced processing time by 45 percent? It’s summarized on the form under ‘Initiative’ with a checkbox next to ‘Meets Standards.’ The 235 hours I spent in May and June mentoring the new hires, an investment that is now paying huge dividends for the entire department? It gets a passing nod as ‘good team collaboration.’

The Sandwich Incident vs. Digital Transformation

I’m thinking of Emerson B., a friend who coordinates educational programs for a city museum. For the first nine months of the year, Emerson single-handedly designed and launched a digital archive for their entire collection, a herculean task involving 35 different departments and digitizing over 5,555 artifacts. It was a monumental, career-defining success. But his annual review was dominated by a single event from last month: a weekend outreach program where the catering company delivered 5 fewer turkey sandwiches than ordered. For 25 minutes, the conversation circled not the digital archive, but the ‘Sandwich Incident’ and the need for ‘more robust vendor oversight.’ A year of transformative work, overshadowed by a minor catering error.

The Revelation: It’s the System, Not Just the Manager

I used to believe this was a personal failing, a symptom of a ‘bad manager.’ I’d sit in these meetings, furious at the injustice, at the sheer laziness of it all. I swore that when I had a team, I would be different. I would keep meticulous notes. I would honor the full scope of a person’s contribution.

And then I became a manager.

My first time conducting reviews was a catastrophe of good intentions. I had a team of five. I had a spreadsheet. I had notes from the entire year. And I had a corporate deadline that gave me 48 hours to submit 15 pages of documentation for each person. I remember sitting at my kitchen table at 1 a.m., surrounded by performance logs, fueled by coffee and a rising sense of panic. For my first employee, I did it right. I wrote 5 pages of detailed, evidence-based analysis. It took me four hours. With the clock ticking, the next four reviews became a blur of keyword matching and template-filling. For my last report, I confess with no small amount of shame, I primarily focused on a project that had concluded the week before. It was fresh in my mind, the details were easy to recall, and the corporate form practically filled itself out. I did the very thing I swore I never would. I hated the process, so I complied with it just to make it end.

It’s a bureaucratic machine that demands inputs, and the easiest input is whatever is closest to the front of the conveyor belt.

We do this everywhere, not just at work. We crave simple categories for complex things. We need to know if something is good or bad, a success or a failure, a fruit or a vegetable. We spend an inordinate amount of time trying to classify things that defy easy labels. It’s funny how we can have more heated debates about topics like sind kartoffeln gemüse than we do about the nuance of a person’s entire year of professional effort. We want the simple answer, the checkbox, the label, because delving into the complex, inconsistent, and deeply human reality is time-consuming. And the system has no time.

The Resource Allocation Ceremony

The meeting has already happened. Not this one, with the cold table and the humming server rack. A different meeting, one that took place weeks ago in a conference room I don’t have access to. It was a meeting with spreadsheets and budgets and department-wide headcount allocations. In that meeting, a decision was made that our department would have a compensation increase pool of, say, 5 percent. A decision was made about who the ‘high-flyers’ were, based on their visibility to senior leadership, and who would get the standard cost-of-living adjustment. A bonus of $575 was approved for one person, a training budget of $2,555 for another.

This meeting, right now, is the administrative echo of that financial one. It’s the corporate theater required to create a paper trail justifying a decision that has already been made.

It’s designed to be inoffensive, legally defensible, and efficient. It is the elaborate, scripted narration for a movie that was shot, edited, and finalized last month. My job is to sit here and nod. David’s job is to read the script. We both understand the terms and conditions of this arrangement, even if we never say it aloud.

The Ritual Complete

He clicks to the final page, the one with the numbers. ‘So, based on the performance this year, we’re able to offer a 3.5 percent merit increase.’

He says it with an air of finality. The number hangs there, a product of a hundred invisible calculations that have little to do with my work in February or Emerson’s sandwiches. It just is.

I say thank you. I sign the digital form. The document is automatically uploaded to a folder in a cloud server, where it will likely remain, unread, for the rest of time. The ritual is complete. The box has been checked. We stand up, shake hands. We can both get back to work now.