You got the [Yearly Bonus]!

Insert appropriate sound effect here.

We got our yearly bonus checks today and the notice of how much our raises would be for the next fiscal year. My yearly review back in December was really good--4.1/5, on a "no one ever gets a 5" scale--so I’ve been looking forward to seeing what the amounts would be for a while. Well, my raise was stereotypical, but my boss told me that was basically a mandate from on high to keep raises standardized and not a reflection on my performance.

My extra bonus on top of that, though, made up for it. The AMA did better than we had expected on our various metrics, so the bonus amount was correspondingly raised, and then my boss's boss put all the extra weighting of my performance review onto the bonus, so it's double what it was last year. It's even higher than the group rating percentage that dictates bonus calculations, which is apparently really rare. And since the bonus is expressed as a fraction of my salary, I can deal with having a lower raise than I was expecting in exchange for getting it up front and being able to do what I want with it.

And with my newfound riches, I...bought iOS Final Fantasy Tactics for $13.99, and I'm probably saving most of the rest. Some things never change. (^_^;)

Crappy Westernized karma

You know what I mean--the idea that your actions balance out on some impartial cosmic scale or something.

So, I got my yearly bonus, and that was really good. Here's what's gone wrong since then:

• I bought Final Fantasy Tactics like I was going to...except I bought the iPhone version and it's not a universal app, so I wasted $14 and I have to buy the iPad version. You might say that this is really minor, and I agree that I'm fortunately not in a place where $14 is an expense I have to fret over, misers experience emotional pain when spending money and that absolutely describes me. I was actually considering for a moment not going to tropicanaomega's birthday party until I realized that was a stupid response to the problem. Also, experiences and memories make us happier than owning things, so even beyond all the obvious reasons it's a stupid response, it's irrational from a utilitarian perspective.


• I started the rice for tomorrow--a heavy load, since I eat some rice in the morning every day as part of this balanced breakfast and tomorrow is also curry night--set everything up, and closed the lid of the rice cooker and turned it on. Except...the lid didn't close, so the rice ended up half-cooked, super-hard, and inedible, requiring me to throw it all away, clean the rice cooker, and do it again.


• I wanted to play Diablo III to recover a bit from the previous two setbacks, but that failed too. It turns out that RCN is having outages in Chicago and eastern Massachusetts, which are intermittent enough that just browsing around the internet isn't really affected, but trying to play a massively singleplayer game fails because the lag spikes are just enough to repeatedly kick me out of the game.


• I just realized while writing this that I was going to make tea and I forgot.

Disgusted with all that, I turned to making up more Exalted thaumaturgy rituals. At least my computer didn't explode while doing that or writing this, though at this point, I shouldn't tempt fate.