I'm counting the empties from last night. Nine.

How did I drink nine beers last night?

I don't know. What I do know is: I’m hung over and tired and full of regrets.

I will make myself pay for it. Full hour of exercise. 30 minutes weights, 30 minutes cardio. No matter how crappy it goes or how tired I am I will force msyself.

Also I’m nervous about my 1:1 with Neil. Not because of what we’re going to talk about or anything. Most likely we’ll just discuss project plans and dates and that sort of stuff. It’ll hopefully be fine. He might chew me out for my ‘vacationing’ last week. He does that. This man does not believe in time off. He is a terrifying subcreature and I despise him and wish I reported to someone else.

I have about fifteen minutes. I think that what I’d like to talk about is Ed.

Ed is apparently getting a 2/1 or a 1 /2 on his review.

I walked into his office yesterday and he was hunched over his char, his sunburnt brow furrowed in deep consternation as he examined a screen full of charts and numbers. “Hey, how’s it going?” I asked. He pushed his feet out from under him and used them to propel his chair about two feet back from the desk, then leaned back a bit. An uncontrolled hand flew up to push his bangs back from his forehead and he smiled. “Oh, it’s going,” he said. That’s Ed. Smiling even though the world isn’t smiling with him.

“So I really just wanted to see how your one on one went with Neil. I mean, I’m assuming it was okay, that you probably got a two-two, but I’d like to hear it from you,” I said, looking at his whiteboard. The previous week I had added a nonsensical diagram consisting of a few components – a database, Sentinel, an equilateral triangle – and then connected them all with lines, using a red dry erase marker. Anyone looking at it would think: Important work must be getting done in here! I barely understand this stuff! But the diagram was gone, replaced by just a few sentences, written in green. Very unexciting.

The face falls immediately, smile gone, and he tells me that it didn’t go that well. He’s not really making eye contact with me any more, instead choosing to focus his attention on the LCD display again.

“Are you kidding me?” I ask. “What’s not well? Did you get a one-two or a two-one maybe?” My hands are in my pockets and I’ve started to pace around the small indoor office.

“Yeah. I’m getting a two-one,” he says flatly. “Holy crap,” I say, trying to sound indignant. “That’s really stupid.”

Then I launch into a two minute tirade, designed to make Ed feel as though the rating isn’t really his fault – that rather, he is a victim of circumstance, but even as I’m talking, I have my doubts. You see, even though Ed is a very likeable person, easygoing and relatively intelligent, I think he’s ugly. He has a body type that screams indulgence to me, tells me that he doesn’t exercise regularly and he always eats too much. His well-padded buttocks ride up too high in the back, and his paunch is slung pretty low in the front, giving his body a comical sort of inverted symmetry. Most likely places a very high value on eating a good meal, and eating a considerable quantity of it. Every day. And it’s this indulgence that I see that prevents me from honestly evaluating him. I don’t honestly have the slightest idea how Ed performs as a worker, but it’s probably good enough. Even as I'm evaluating him in this way, I kind of hate myself for doing it. I mean I am a man and he is a man and we are not supposed to care what one another looks like and we are supposed to judge one another based on our merits as human beings, and not such petty things, like his big fat head.

One thing I do know about Ed that I admire, though – he does not go above and beyond. There is no striving, no ceaseless ambition of the sort that periodically invades my own head.

Specifically, Ed very, very rarely does any visible work. He’s also very insistent upon working eight or eight and a half hours a day, and that’s it. There’s another point here, in that he supports Documentum, which isn’t very visible or valued by management either. Then there’s the problem of the Wire project. Neil doesn’t like the Wire project, mostly because he doesn’t understand it, and he has the sneaking suspicion that another person could handle it better than Ed. I mention most of these points in my mini-rant, although I can plainly see that he’s heard it all before and these words are doing very little in the way of consolation. Before I leave, he reminds me to not say anything to anyone else. That our conversation is just between he and I. It’s a good thing that he reminded me, because I would have otherwise told both Glen and Will, in the span of the next hour. I’m a terrible gossip sometimes.

Anyhow, it’s eight thirty and I have to get going… time to start another day at the ‘ol office.