Fall Has Fell

Well, sort of, anyway. There was a chill in the air before swim practice, and it smacked me in the face with the realization that summertime is nearing its end. Sigh.

Yes, I know that the weekend temperature is supposed to be back near 100°, but the sun is rising later, and it's cooler outside than inside. That means the seasons, they are a-changing.

[Side question: Does Bob Dylan get royalties for every time somebody adds an "a" to the front of a word? How does it happen that we end up with permanent cliché phrases, just because some hack harmonica player needed an extra syllable in a song and was too lazy to rewrite the verse to fit the music? Geez.]

Speaking of poets, this particular time of year always reminds me of a poem I heard for the first time in grade school:

Spring has sprung, Fall has fell,
Summer is here, and it's hotter than...usual.

And that reminds me of Muhammad Ali's poetic prognostication:

After I whup Joe Frazier
And he don't hear the bell.
I'm gonna hop over the rope
And whup Howard Cosell.

What does this have to do with anything, you ask? Well, nothing, I'm afraid. But as the literary scholar I am, I take great pleasure in passing along my passion for poetry (as well as my fondness for groundbreaking sportscasters and people who taunt them in rhyme.)

Anyway, the onset of Autumn begets several annual rituals that are worthy of comment. One is the changing of the aspens, but we'll talk about that later when, well...when they actually change. Another is the back-to-school wave of new people threatening to join the swim team. All health clubs seem to have a surge in attendance when the kids return to Academia, and our group is no exception. Over the last week, I've received a half-dozen calls from people wanting info on the team. They each say they'll attend practice in the following week, but we rarely see even one out of three. And of those who do show up once, 80% will bail out and never be seen again. We've never done a serious study of the reasons, but most people blame the dropout rate on my abrasive personality and lack of social skills...which of course is ridiculous.

Isn't it?

Hmmm. Anyway, speaking of personal assessments, the final insult that accompanies the Fall season is the dreaded "Performance Evaluation". I'm not sure who thought up this abomination, but almost every company subjects their employees to the humiliation of spending hours filling out a list of accomplishments, only to be rated as "average" to meet the quotas of the faceless automatons behind the HR curtain.

Performance appraisal is a relatively painless process for my job with the swim team, and we've jumped through all the hoops already. But at my other job, they'll stretch it out over months, and involve dozens of people in a multitude of activities with the goal of thoroughly and unquestionably determining that I'll get the same rating and raise as I have the last 5 years. It's all very silly. And since I write about silly stuff in this column, chances are good that you'll hear more about it over the next couple of months. How's that for a teaser, eh?

For the immediate future, though, stay tuned for a synopsis of my next business trip. I'm going to California for a few days, and will share some of those experiences with you. In the meantime, enjoy the last gasps of summer, and have a great day!