I don’t patronize the Wal-Mart near the Blog Cave. There’s a couple of reasons for that. The biggest reason is that it is ALWAYS crowded, unless you go in between the hours of 2am and 4am. In addition, the store itself is so overloaded with merchandise that it always looks cluttered, makes it almost mandatory that you walk down the aisles (what there are of them) in single-file and constantly amazes me that the Fire Marshall hasn’t cited them for hazardous conditions. Personally, I prefer Target stores for my discount shopping.

But if you are a shopper who frequents your area Wal-Mart, you might be interested in visiting Wal-Mart Crime Reports, which tracks the number of police calls to individual Wal-Mart stores and allows you to view those numbers of the stores closest to you when you submit your zip code. Amazingly, when I put in my zip code, the store closest to me has the lowest number of calls of all the stores in the greater metropolitan Orlando area. Still, that number, gathered since 2002, works out to one call per week for the past 4 years.

If you’re interested, check out your own local store and see how many police calls have been recorded.

I mentioned in an earlier post that we were going totally wireless here in the Blog Cave. This past Monday morning the land line was turned off (just in time to avoid those intrusive campaign calls before the election in 3 weeks) and I collected all the wired phones from around the Cave and placed them in a box to go in the attic. Although I’m glad to have them gone, it turns out some habits are hard to break. For instance, I still walk into the Cave and instinctively look to where the answering machine used to be to see if any messages came in while we were out.

When Blog Girl called to tell BellSouth we wanted to turn off the land line, I was mildly surprised to hear from her at the conclusion of that call that there was no effort to try and talk us into retaining the line. Family, friends and acquaintances have reported to us in the past that when making similar calls they have been offered rebates, chances to hold their number for 60 days in case they changed their minds, or at the least to have a recording on the line to direct callers to any new number. Not that we would have used them, but Blog Girl received none of those offers.

I came across an interesting piece of information that may explain that lack of effort.

Current Analysis, Inc., a company that, according to their website, “provides competitive response solutions that enable companies to effectively anticipate and counter competitive threats, and win more business.” released statistics that showed as customers continue to trade in land lines for voice-over-Internet-protocol phones, cellphones and cable-enabled phone service, 20 million phone lines have fallen out of use in the past six years in the U.S.. 20 million! That’s a little over 9,000 each and every day of those 6 years.

No wonder they gave up trying to talk customers into retaining their home land lines.

Every quarter, the big government agency I work for requires Employee Performance Reviews to take place. I have to administer them to the staff in my department and in turn I have to endure receive one from my supervisor.

Actually, I’m pretty fortunate (in one respect) in that my boss says to me, “Here, write yours up and if I agree with it I’ll sign it”. I say “in one respect” because it may be as hard or harder to write your own review as it is to listen to one your boss has written. At least if you’re an introspective person or one who is not prone to blowing your own horn, I think it is. Sometimes I find it difficult to enumerate (or even remember) things I’ve done in the course of a quarter that would call for recognition and or notation, while at the same time I have to curb my tendency to point out ALL my shortcomings and areas that need improving.

Blog Girl says I’m too hard on myself, and she may be right, but I’d rather it be me doing it instead of someone else.

Of course having to perform an Employee Performance Review can be stressful too. Although I’ve done it before (and will in the future), I don’t particularly enjoy discussing a person’s shortcomings in their work, especially since you know that most people are not going to react kindly to even constructive criticism. But again, I’m fortunate in that regard as well because I have the greatest group of people to work with in my department. Their reviews typically consist of, “Great job, do this a little more to advance, keep up the excellent work, etc” I try to be as individualized as I can be in preparing and writing their reviews because I think it’s important to give each person that attention to their work, but on the whole I could write “Great job!” for all of them and be done with it. Except, as I said, I believe they deserve more than a generic review, whether it’s good or not.

And that’s where the stress comes in for me this time. Because right now we’re all involved in a couple of huge projects that are causing me to put in 12 and 13 hour work days and keeping me busy the entire time I am at work. I’m feeling the time crunch when it comes to wanting to dedicate more time to these reviews…and not having the time to do so. To add to the pressure, management chose to move up the completion date for the reviews by about a week.

So this time around the reviews will not be as detailed as I would like because, as I said today, “We’re all victims of time”. I will try to individualize them as much as possible but they will be brief and to the point.