The torch hissed, a steady, focused blue cone that didn’t care about my quarterly goals. I was rotating a section of lead glass, waiting for that specific, honey-like slump that tells you the material is ready to obey. My fingers still smelled faintly of the orange I’d peeled earlier-one continuous, perfect spiral of zest that sat on my workbench like a trophy. Then Greg walked in. Greg doesn’t smell like citrus; he smells like unvented frustration and the specific brand of institutional carpet cleaner they use in the front office. He didn’t wait for me to set the glass down in the annealing oven. He just stood there with a clipboard, the physical manifestation of an interruption, and told me it was time for my ‘annual conversation.’ I hate that phrase. It’s a linguistic mask, a way to dress up a scheduled interrogation in the Sunday clothes of a friendly chat.

We sat in his office, which has exactly 4 chairs, all of them slightly uncomfortable. He opened a file on his laptop and started reading from a script. He was talking about a project I finished 14 months ago-a custom sign for a bar on 44th Street. He mentioned that there had been a ‘minor calibration oversight’ in the initial installation. I stared at him. I remembered that sign. I remembered the rain that day, the way the mercury rolled inside the tubing like liquid silver, and the fact that I’d fixed the calibration within 24 minutes of noticing it. But here we were, over a year later, using a dead moment in time to calibrate my current worth. It felt like trying to navigate a ship by looking at a map of a different ocean. This is the first lie of the performance review: that it is a tool for development. In reality, it’s a forensic audit of a person who no longer exists. The Iris T.-M. who worked on the 44th Street sign is gone; she’s been replaced by the Iris who is currently trying to figure out how to explain that neon doesn’t adhere to a 4-point scale of efficiency.

Cognitive Dissonance: The Two Irises

There’s a specific kind of cognitive dissonance that happens when you’re forced to listen to a critique of your past self while your present self is worrying about the tension in a glass bend sitting on the bench. I found myself thinking about the 124 different ways a neon tube can fail, and how none of them are covered in the employee handbook. Greg was droning on about ‘synergy’ and ‘alignment,’ words that have been scrubbed of all meaning through over-use. He told me I was ‘exceeding expectations’ in technical skill but ‘meeting expectations’ in administrative compliance. This translated to: I’m good at my job, but I’m bad at filling out the forms that prove I’m good at my job.

The Document as a Shield

I realized then that the performance review isn’t for me. It’s a legal shield. It’s the paper trail HR needs to justify whatever decision they’ve already made in a room I’ll never enter. If they want to promote me, the review will reflect ‘untapped leadership potential.’ If they want to keep my salary stagnant, it will highlight ‘areas for growth in soft skills.’ The document is a Rorschach test for management. I looked at the screen and saw a graph showing my productivity over the last 14 months. It was a jagged line that looked like a mountain range, but it didn’t account for the days the humidity was too high for the pumps to work correctly, or the weeks I spent mentoring the new apprentice who ended up quitting because he couldn’t handle the heat of the ribbons. All that lived experience was flattened into a single data point. It’s an insult to the complexity of the work, honestly. We treat humans like machines that need an annual tune-up, but even machines get more frequent maintenance than this.

[The performance review is a tombstone for a year’s worth of effort.]

– Reflection, Anonymized

I tried to explain to Greg that the ‘oversight’ from 14 months ago was actually a deliberate choice to ensure the longevity of the transformer, but he just blinked. He didn’t have a box for ‘deliberate choice’ on his form. He only had ‘Target Met’ or ‘Target Not Met.’ It made me think about the time I tried to explain the concept of

KPOP2 to my grandmother-the vibrant energy, the precision, the sheer scale of the production-and she just asked if they knew how to knit. Some things simply don’t translate across generational or institutional gaps. Greg and I were speaking two different languages. I was speaking the language of glass and electricity; he was speaking the language of liability and budget codes. This disconnect is where the soul of a company goes to die. When you formalize feedback into a high-stakes, once-a-year event, you kill the possibility of real, organic growth. You create a culture of fear where people hoard their mistakes and polish their mirrors, hoping no one sees the cracks until after the review cycle is over.

The Value of an Implosion

I once made a mistake that cost the company $444 in wasted materials. I’d been working on a complex piece of script-a ‘Cocktails’ sign for a high-end lounge-and I’d gotten the pressure wrong in the final stage. The whole thing imploded. I didn’t wait for my annual review to talk about it. I told my supervisor immediately, we analyzed what went wrong with the vacuum pump, and I learned more in those 14 minutes of honest failure than I did in 14 years of sitting in Greg’s office. That’s the irony. Real development happens in the dirt, in the middle of the mess, when the glass is hot and the stakes are immediate. It doesn’t happen in a beige room with a spreadsheet. But the system can’t track ‘learning from an implosion.’ It can only track ‘waste.’

As Greg continued to flip through the digital pages of my life, I found my mind wandering back to the orange peel. Why did I care that it was in one piece? Because it was a display of mastery over a mundane task. It was a private moment of excellence that no one would ever evaluate. There’s a certain freedom in the work that goes unmeasured. If Greg knew how much time I spent perfecting the curve of a single ‘S,’ he’d probably mark me down for ‘inefficiency.’ He doesn’t understand that the inefficiency is where the beauty comes from. If we only did what was ‘efficient,’ we’d only have straight lines and fluorescent bulbs. We wouldn’t have the warm, buzzing glow of neon that makes a city feel alive at 4:04 AM. The performance review is the enemy of the curve. It wants everything to be a straight line, predictable and easy to graph.

I think I might have actually fallen asleep for 4 seconds during his lecture on ‘proactive communication.’ I woke up to him asking if I had any comments to add to the formal record. I looked at the blinking cursor on his screen. I wanted to say that this whole process is a ritual of mutual deception. I wanted to say that I know he doesn’t want to be here any more than I do. I wanted to tell him that my ‘areas for development’ are mostly just things I’ve learned to hide better. But instead, I just nodded. I said, ‘I appreciate the feedback, Greg. I’ll keep focusing on the documentation.’ It was a lie, but it was the right kind of lie. It was the lubricant that allowed the gears of the machine to keep turning without grinding to a halt.

We finished the meeting in 44 minutes exactly. Greg seemed pleased with himself. He’d checked all the boxes, saved the PDF, and sent it to the digital ether where it would sit, undisturbed, until next year. I walked back to my bench. The orange peel was starting to curl at the edges, losing its vibrant color as it dried out. I picked up the glass tube I’d been working on. It had cooled down too much. I’d have to start the heating process all over again. The review hadn’t made me a better technician; it had just made me a late one. I fired up the torch, the hiss returning like a familiar friend. The blue flame danced, indifferent to the fact that I was ‘meeting expectations.’

I wonder how many hours are lost every year to this ritual. If you multiply the 44 minutes by the 444 employees in this building, you get a staggering amount of wasted potential. Imagine if we spent that time actually talking to each other. Not about goals or metrics, but about the work. Imagine if Greg came into the shop and asked me why the red neon gas behaves differently than the blue argon. Imagine if I felt comfortable telling him that his new scheduling software makes it impossible for me to let the glass anneal properly. But that would require vulnerability, and the performance review is the opposite of vulnerable. It is a suit of armor. It is a way to keep everyone at arm’s length while pretending to be close.

[The tragedy of the modern workplace is the belief that a person can be summarized in a PDF.]

– Final Realization

I made a mistake once, a big one. I accidentally cross-contaminated a batch of gas. It was a $1,444 error. I felt sick about it for weeks. In my review that year, it wasn’t even mentioned. Why? Because it didn’t fit the narrative the manager wanted to tell. They wanted to show that the department was improving, so they buried the loss in ‘operational overhead.’ That’s when I knew for sure that the paper trail is a work of fiction. We are all characters in a story written by people who don’t understand the plot. We’re just trying to keep the lights on-literally, in my case.

The Craft’s Review

As the sun started to set, casting long shadows across the shop floor, I finally finished the bend I’d been struggling with. It was perfect. A sharp, elegant curve that would hold the light and never leak. I didn’t need a rating to tell me it was good. I could see it in the way the glass caught the light. I could feel it in the steady rhythm of my breathing. This is the only review that matters: the one between the craftsman and the craft. The rest is just noise. The rest is just ozone and paper. I looked at the orange peel one last time before tossing it into the bin. It had served its purpose. It had reminded me that some things are meant to be whole, even if only for a moment, and even if no one is there to give them a score. I turned off the torch, the silence rushing back in, and for the first time in 44 minutes, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.