Annual PurrBarkformance Review

Performance Review form by Zoolatry.

We are new to this annual purrbarkformance review so please forgive us if we digress, rant or otherwise trip over ourselves trying to be fair, honest and impartial..

Quantity of Output. Well, we can't fault Jan for not transcribing our posts fast enough. We (usually Percy) type our own. But we can fault her for our not having enough access to the computer. She claims it isn't her fault the computer has been down several times, sometimes for several weeks, this past year. How does she expect us to post without a computer? Or when the machine should be in intensive care instead of online?

We will give her points for her brother finally scrubbing the hard drive and loading everything from scratch. And she has hinted we should ask Santa for a faster, photo-friendly computer. But she has also hinted we might someday get an allowance and we have yet to see a penny. So to be fair -- just in case Santa really can drop a computer down a chimney without breaking it -- we'll change her score from a minus 4 paws to a plus 1 paw.


(Doesn't Cotton have pretty tortie feet?)

Quality of Output. We do our own output, so again we can't fault her if our friends don't like what we post. But we could have better quality output if she would download the camera so we could post our photos before we have forgotten about them. For example, she hasn't downloaded the photos recently for at least elevently-seven-nine days. Every cat and dog will forget what we look like. Since we do need her help with the photos and we don't want to discourage her from helping us, we won't give her a minus 1 paws. She does take good quality pictures -- well, usually -- so we'll give her a plus 2 paws.



Client Pawticipation: Jan is doing a better job in this category. We have our own email address, a twitter and a facebook account. So there should be no problem contacting us. However, the question is, does anyone want to? We give Jan plus 4 paws here.



Client Pawticipation (Part II): Jan used to be overprotective and would hardly let us participate in anything, except a couple of CCSI productions. (She called it being busy.) But, despite all the offline time we've had this year, Jan has allowed, even encouraged us to participate in contests and fun times. Merci ran for Cutest Dog, she won Baby Patches' Next Dog Model Contest, Crystal went on The Meezer's Hams of the World Tour with a host of dogs and cats, we did Ariel's Valentine post, Ludo's Doing Nothing (we forget what it's actually called) photo contest, Romeo's Favorite Furball contest, Monty's Doing the Q, Cyndi modeled on Catwalk Caturday, Cameron attended Sweet Praline's birthday coed sleepover, and ..... We did a lot of posts to help Carrol Crocker's dogs and the Lakemore Cats.

Okay, guess our year isn't quite as bad as we remember it. We did more than we thought this year. But a lot less than many other cats & dogs. We're going to give Jan plus 4 paws on this one anyway.


On second thought, Jan needs to have something to motivate her to improve for next year, so we're going to take back 1 paw in each Client Pawticipation category and only give her plus 3 paws. (You thought we couldn't count, didn't you!)

Client Satisfaction: We have mixed feelings on this as the vote is rocking back and forth. We aren't really sure if our friends are content with what they read in our journal.
a. Buddy thinks some are content with what they read but doesn't know what Jan has to do with it.
b.Cameron is trying to count our 2009 posts on two paws to see if we gave readers enough content.
c. Merci says we should take a poll.
d. Rusty believes we need to do better next year.
e. Crystal says we should give our readers more Ham Tours. We agree. The ham he brought back was delicious!
f. Cotton questions whether we do enough reviews.
g. Sam says we should do more taste testing reviews.
h. Cyndi thinks we are doing okay, but isn't positive, so she's undecided.
i. And I, Percy, would like to see Jan volunteer to take the blame for any reader dissatisfaction.

With such diversity of opinion, we have had a time coming up with a number here. But we have finally arrived at a solution. We give her a plus 1 paw. Next year, if she offers us some good content ideas, maybe we'll give her 2.



Overall rating, comments & suggestions for improvement: Her overall score is a 10. We have no idea of what that means. Oh, it means she has 10 out of a possible 20 paws up. Guess she's a medium.

Buddy: Medium? She looks like an XLarge to me.

Please ignore Buddy. The rest of us would call Jan a petite if it would get us an allowance! But the subject is Jan's annual PurrBarkformance Review. Jan is a medium, or average.

As to suggestions, we would like to see Jan pay us for our creative posts, give us more treats, send us first class on a cruise ship, and ... Oh, we're just supposed to make suggestions about the blog? Well, we definitely need more computer time!

But, overall, it looks like we won't be advertising for another human to replace Jan. At least not for the moment.

(s) Crystal, Cotton, Merci, Cyndi, Percy, Cameron, Buddy, Rusty & Sam