An interactive employee evaluation, leaked to us by a very, very distressed employee:

Current job title

Associate Director for Vision and Articulation at [Redacted] (a mid-sized architectural firm of some repute)

Current salary

$45K

Years in position

7

Years with company

7

Years left

oh god

Main achievements accomplished this year

expanded our cross-disciplinary cross-pollinated cross-methodological data-driven research-based evidence-based design-oriented laboratory for architectural innovation and strategic development into a fully inter-disciplinary inter-pollinated inter-methodological research-driven data-based design-facing evidence-oriented innovation and strategy studio.

What would you consider your greatest strengths?

staying at work for 20 hours in a row, caffeine management, I own the thesaurus

What are your growth edges aka areas for leadership potential aka learning frontiers?

drawing on paper; model-making; eye contact with boss

What would you recommend we do to better facilitate engagement?

…. talk to me?

What’s one thing you love about working at [Redacted]

the time you increased the number of X-acto knives you buy per year so that i didn’t have to try and sharpen the blades on the edges of my sorrow

What’s one thing you wish we would improve at [Redacted]

the number of X-acto knives you buy bc i’m still sharpening more than is ideal on the edges of my sorrow and it’s starting to feel p eternal

Do you feel valued in your position?

i do feel value….. ENGINEERED (mic drop)

What kinds of rewards do you feel contribute to increased productivity?

would be a philosophical impossibility to increase productivity but for rewards i would like, 1) to have my face somewhere screenprinted onto some part of at least one of the buildings (our little secret) 2) to be allowed to do more than render the bathroom closet (at least give me a bathroom OR a closet but not a bathroom closet) 3) next time you choose an employee of the month instead of giving us stars that we can use to redeem for 1 minute of time with our principal [Redacted] for purposes of asking for theoretical clarification as to what exactly we do here all day long with our cross-pollinated renderings, we can use it for 1 minute of time to lie under our desks and casually confront the abyss of the edges of our eternal sorrow

What do you enjoy about my management style?

wait i thought you were the new intern

My status is irrelevant

wait why are you responding to what i’m actually saying

How do you work best?

ok now we’re back to … wait

are you a robot

I am a real person

just say the words “i am not a robot”

How do you work best?

ok i see how this is going to go

i work best at my desk with all the lights off so that i can better see the glare of the autoCAD for help w/ the bathroom closet configuration and also to better see the text box that i’m writing next to the bathroom closet configuration bc for some reason our principal, [Redacted], is completely obsessed with our writing some sort of narrative text that the reader (client) can climb aboard and interact with. like *i* do not work best constantly quoting foucault and barthes and talking about how the work isn’t the text but the work can become the text once the reader gets into it, but i guess everyone else here works best constantly quoting foucault and barthes and then throwing in a hejduk and being like “a text is … a wall that is also… a plane that is also … a floor,” like *i* would like to work best by having a job that actually acknowledges that i spent five years in undergrad in studio at rice learning how to do drawings and also computer drawings and then acknowledges that i spent three years at columbia getting my MArch and i was totally there *after* the whole late-nineties let’s-make-shapes-with-Rhino-thing, you know that thing i mean, and so i guess how i work best is like can everyone stop quoting philosophy that doesn’t actually apply to architecture bc architecture is fundamentally not a philosophical game, it is fundamentally actually a fundamental Life Event Facilitator, and you know, when i went to school it was so that i could change how people experienced the world and experienced space and thought about space and also maybe had a front door that didn’t open right into the kitchen, but they did, bc the condo designers were too busy writing a text box quoting foucault and barthes, and remember diller scofidio + renfro’s slither project in japan? that was actually cool and life-changing and gave everyone a front door and i was like yes yes yes she said yes, angles will change the world and instead, here i am trying to figure out how to specify this bathroom closet drawer and seriously what and also

ugh fuck

X-acto knife run-in

sorry

got distracted by the actual physical edges of my x-acto knife encountering the edges of the abyss of this eternal experiential what-the-fuck

oh probably [Redacted] would turn this into a theoretical underpinning, What-The-Fuck-ness.

omg book idea

Do you know how to appropriately capitalize words?

wait, who’s reading this evaluation

Just checking

i thought this was anonymous

I am simply offering feedback on your feedback

oh super chill did not realize there would feedback on the feedback so let me drill down to close the loop to level up to increase engagement to charette the deconstruction of the exurbial fenestration within an ergonomic and diagrammatic materiality and you know what, truncate this bc those edges are getting real close

I hear your feedback and I offer you friendship

omigod namaste

Dear [Redacted]

I write to offer my resignation as Associate Director for Research and Articulation because I have literally no idea what I have been doing for the last seven years and I have run out of evens. I am going to yoga school.

Yours sincerely,

the architect who sits at the desk third back in the fourteenth row and who you definitely walked by that one time that i was covered in blood from a dull X-acto knife incident and it was the only time you ever made eye contact with me and/or spoke to me and it was to say, “oh, i love this pointillism,” and it was my blood