The worst feeling in the world

If you ever want to have a stomach clenching, nerve-knotting, sweat-inducing, tension raising experience that makes you feel lower than you have ever felt before in your life, if you ever want to feel as worthless as your significant other sometimes says you are, if you want to think you are fortunate just to be allowed to breathe the air, if you ever want to feel the need to grovel on your stomach, if you ever feel like you should be crawling around like a snake begging for a crust of bread and a sip of water from the mud puddle, that feeling is extremely easy to get. just go have your perfomance review at work.
Oh, most of the year, you might think you are great. Customers love you, compliment you regularly, both to your face and to your coworkers and supervisors on the job you do. Your coworkers appreciate the effort you put in to making their job easier. You might garner new customers, retain old ones, open new product lines, improve old ones, arrive at work early and stay late to make sure the job is done. You might streamline operations and find new ways to improve the operation. You are sitting on top of the world. You have accomplished more in less time than anyone believed possible.
The boss praises you for your work and talks about how great it is to have you on board. The world is your Rally Monkey. Then that fateful day arrives. You go in for your performance review.
Now, naturally, in light of all your hard work and accomplishments, you know this will be a good review. You are happy, you are confident, you are a fool.
Because no review in the world is ever good. After all, if the boss admits how good a job you do, they might have to *gasp* pay you as if you had value. And that would suck. So the review goes something like this.
*thought bubble; Hmm, start off with something positive.* Well, worker, you have done some good things this year. *thought bubble; okay, now they are at ease. 1 good thing, now 1 bad thing* However, there are some things that concern me. Your margins aren't high enough, you don't write up enough orders, you have too many errors, you sometimes don't sound like you are smiling when you pick up the phone, you need to get a higher percentage of your quotes turned into orders, your hair gel tends to lose its hold after 12 or 13 hours, your desk tends to have too many papers on it, it is hard to believe any one person could have that many lice, which, by the way, is a word you regularly mispronounce, your partner has not shown as much improvement as expected which is a direct reflection on your ability to support him, bubble gum doesn't taste as good as it used to, your significant other is not projecting the image the company would like to see, the seagulls are making a mess of his car and taxes are too high.
Meanwhile, you sit there wondering how someone as shoddy at their job as you are is still employed and also exactly what seagull droppings have to do with your ability to sell ice boxes to eskimos. You have never even seen a seagull.
Then you get a raise and go back to work, but you spend the rest of the day wondering if you are great (you got a raise) or you suck worse than anyone else ever has and are about to be fired (everything said in the interview room).
Sometimes you wonder why the work world is so sadistic. Then you remember; if we made it enjoyable then everyone would work hard and the world would be smoother. And no one wants that.