Nerd Girl(22)

After the introductions, I headed back to my office to let the morning’s activities and information sink in. It was going to be a while before I had another long, relaxing weekend; maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to start a new book the other night after all. I sighed and laid out my plan of attack for the next two weeks.

An hour later, my stomach growled as my thoughts kept returning back to Ryan. Damn him. I had promised myself to stop obsessing over him. I’m pathetic, because it took less than twenty-four hours before my promise flew out the window. My moment of opportunity to ask Catherine about the picture had passed. Well, at least the picture wasn’t going anywhere. I supposed I could ask Catherine about it anytime. I shook my head, exasperated at the ridiculous coincidence of the situation.

I’m not sure how much more time went by, but when I saw movement in the corner of my eye, I looked up and Vivek was standing at my door. Amy, one of the girls who had interviewed me, was with him. She gave me a little wave, smiled and said hello.

“Amy and I are heading to the cafeteria to grab lunch,” Vivek offered. “We were wondering if you wanted to join us.”

“Sure, that sounds great,” I said appreciatively. I needed the distraction.

As we headed downstairs to the cafeteria, Amy asked how my first day was going. I filled her in on my deliverables and she offered me her assistance tomorrow.

I remembered Amy well from my interview. She appeared to be a little older than me, maybe in her early thirties, and she had two little boys, ages four and one. I recalled seeing several pictures of her family in her office. She was Asian, with beautiful, long, layered black hair, and stylish in her Nordstrom Seven jeans and fitted blazer. Amy managed the vendor relationships with all of our marketing agencies. She was friendly, smart, funny and down to earth. I liked her immediately.

As we entered the cafeteria located in the first floor of the building, I perused the various food stations. The food in MS cafeterias was actually quite decent. I walked by the grill, the sandwich bar, pizza bar, and debated between the stir fry bar and the salad bar, opting for the latter. I waited in line at the cash register and when my turn was up, I swiped my badge to trigger a debit from my prepaid account.

I grabbed a lime sparkling water from one of the large soda refrigerators and spotted Amy waving at me from a booth on the far south side of the cafeteria. As I settled myself into the booth, Vivek and Amy were discussing our annual performance calibrations.

“I’m a little freaked out about this new rating system. Did you have your review yet?” Vivek asked, sounding nervous.

“No, mine’s Wednesday, the week after Catherine gets back. I’ll be happy if I get a three,” Amy replied. Her lips were in a tight smile and when she caught my eye, she sighed and shrugged.

Vivek shook his head in disagreement. “You’ll get a two. The executives love you. They all know who you are and you kicked ass this year.”

“No, I won’t get a two. I come in at nine each morning and leave at five. I don’t work at night. I don’t commit my life and soul to this company.” She said this matter-of-factly, with no excuses or apologies. “I’d be perfectly happy with a three, because I want to spend time with my family.”

MS had a performance management system known as “stack ranking” for rating their employees as top, good, average, or poor. One was the best, five was the worst. Since it was based on a bell curve, most people got three as a score. Your score directly correlated to your annual bonus, stock awards and salary increases.

There had always been a passionate debate, both inside and outside of the company, as to whether or not this was the most effective way to grade employee performance. Vanity Fair even wrote an article about it last month, blaming a perceived MS demise in part to this performance rating system. I could see some logic to the stack ranking approach, as this was a good way to clear out the bottom feeders. The part that I never agreed with was the insistence that a bell curve must be met. If there was a high performing team, like Catherine’s team, and everyone was a rock star, unfortunately someone had to get the low score. Yet if there was another team with a group of mediocre performers relative to your own team, they would have some people still come out on top. I never understood the macro-level justice in that. Sometimes, this would foster competition with members in your own team, which might lead to an aggressive, unfriendly working environment. The theory was that everyone was out for his or her own, rather than helping the company in a “one for all, all for one” attitude. No one said MS was a walk in the park. I was a firm believer in the philosophy, “If you can’t handle the heat, then get out of the kitchen.” And many did. I didn’t disagree with the Vanity Fair article, but like any argument, it showed only one side of the story.