The vibe check of my whole life, the existential agonizing reappraisal I conduct in seconds, hinges entirely on that one word that slipped: the indefinite article “a.” It’s the difference between the vague, collective failure of “man” (mankind, the bureaucracy, the general) and the demanding, specific action of “a man”—the only figure capable of a giant leap. Neil Armstrong muffed it, and the world has been paying the price ever since, substituting empty collective nouns for tangible individual effort.
That Monday evening, I was “a man,” apprehended flagrante delicto, stepping off the path, only to be clapped back by a park guard—a miraculous and annoying apparition of petty authority. He popped off and rained down a hail of words—a shower of administrative fury that, in a sudden, cringe-worthy pivot of bathos, turned into praise and a wish for a hell of long years of healthy longevity. The descent from bureaucratic threat to ridiculous blessing was swift.
My crime? Picking up a plastic water bottle. That’s it. My act of being “a man” was an immediate response to a demand I couldn’t ignore, a real-world application of the hygiene factor theory from my college notes: leave the small negative thing unattended, and it leaves a mold in the mind that leads to a pile of regrets. This is why I live by my seconds-long appraisal. My metric isn’t a rating; it’s muttering: Did I act with a second thought? That is my wit, my defense against the inevitable howl of regret.
I’m low-key about demystifying status, choosing to look like cabbages—unassuming, essential—while doing the necessary work with hand tools, mops, and brooms. I’m no snazzy foppish figure, but I leave indelible marks. My “last feat”—tackling the three horrific garbage hot spots—was a hammer and tongs effort, a small-scale revolution against the mélange of collective carelessness. While everyone engaged in empty talk about the big road project, I acted, knowing the Spanish proverb was right: by the street of by-and-by one arrives at the house of never. I was the hogwash village idiot, the Boris Pasternak who survives by ignoring the general’s rules, proving that the new order of the words is Done easier than said. I used my own money, hired two youngsters, and turned my house into a temporary dumpster to break the cycle. This mystery is a testament to the demand for individual action.
The word “demand” itself became my lightning rod. My lifelong anxiety (inquietude), stemming from joining my batch late and perpetually playing catch-up, was a lack of self-imposed demand. Then came, the instructor, a human embodiment of demand. He was caviar to the general because his rigor, which felt like a slap in the face to our sorry state of English skills, defied the law of diminishing returns. His classes, though remedial, were highly coveted and repeated. He was the antithesis of the wann feeling that comes from low effort.
My final year papers were the perfect illustration of this struggle. The first was soft pathos (Greek: suffering, evoking pity). The second was bathos, trying to graft Perestroika and voodoo economics onto a furniture cooperative report. I struggled with my verbose language, but the upshot (the final shot in an archery contest, the result) was that the sheer struggle for content met the instructor’s demand, earning me a rare flash of a smile.
My friend’s performance appraisal topic led to a near fist fight over uncitable content. The key takeaway, the lesson I internalized, was that the supervisor should have been appraised on the performance of the least effective supervisee. Appraisal must be proactive and open.
The company I worked for lately was the institutional failure of this concept. The annual, emotionally charged appraisal, tied to salary, was a sick joke, a burlesque where scores were always 4.9-5 out of five. Ideas were mocked as a token for the exit door. Managers didn’t grasp that improvements needed a quick tete-a-tete, not an annual formality. It was a place where component parts consumption was the main business, a standup comedy company where demagogues could take a country to its doom through systemic mediocrity.
This history explains why my seconds-long appraisal is constant. The formal systems are incapable of correcting mistakes in real-time. The story of Roy Riegels running the wrong way in the Rose Bowl or Douglas “Wrong-Way” Corrigan flying toward Ireland is proof: a wrong direction must be corrected in the moment. You must appraise and fix immediately. The problem wasn’t Riegels; it was the teammate who didn’t correct him sooner, allowing the minor error to become the margin of defeat.
My employment history—my overall appraisal of my employers—is a list of failures to act.
My first government enterprise was so corrupt that appraisal was alien. Its only virtue was in the incomplete environments—the negative space where unofficial, real work could occur. Proving worth meant signing preprepared formats for purchases, wasting a dear workforce on the optics of effort.
My second government institution was a different flavor of chaotic. The workforce was barely reading and writing, forcing a cringe-worthy performance where one had to appear competent. The tragedy was using these workers to sign documents they couldn’t read, signing their names to the great, collective lie. The expat project manager, whose only honest communication was a seal engraved with “Bull Shit,” was the closest thing to an objective appraiser. The only truly valuable person was the Chinese-origin man hired as a CAD operator due to a legal loophole—the real engineer smuggled into the system.
My last employer, after a promising start, devolved into pure box-checking and worthless signature-putting. The environment became utterly vulgaire, fostering such waste that theft felt almost justified as a perverse form of economic utility.
The ultimate lesson, the one that took years to truly slip into focus, is that employment is reciprocal. Successful companies attract and maintain a hardcore—people committed to the demand of the work. My previous employers, instead, were happily awarding employment to girlfriends and third chance bonus life-wielding dotards who held the institution in a ransom-like chaos through destruction with their empty legacy. They were the anti-demand, the ultimate purveyors of bathos.
I have to be my own maintenance chief, running a day-by-day primer on my output, not waiting for the annual joke. I must be the “a man” who seizes the moment, acts on impulse, and accepts the ridiculous consequences without complaint. It’s the ultimate chiasmus—the demand for perfect internal and external alignment. I’m choosing to be the “a man” who takes the necessary step, even if it feels invita Minerva. I’m not doing it for the general; I’m doing it because the taste of self-correction is the only one I need to acquire. I’m low-key obsessed with ensuring my personal performance never devolves into a check box. That’s the only way to earn the giant leap—by making sure the one small step is actually worth a damn.
Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye