Garrison Keillor famously wrote about a place called Lake Wobegon, where "all the children are above average."

Under the Blunt administration, the people who run the state have apparently worked very hard to make sure that we have an opposite Lake Wobegon effect.  Bluntees have rigged the system so that state employees are always adjudged average or below. 

Blunt administration appointees have invented and implemented an employee rating system called PERforM [1], on which they will presumably make "merit" pay increase decisions for workers.  Because pay for working people hinges on the ratings, Bluntees have to be very careful to make sure that even employees who earn high marks don't get scored that way. 

Consider the discussion of the PERforM system from this email, sent earlier this year by a manager from a state facility in southeast Missouri...

From:        Howell, Michael
Sent:         Monday, March 31, 2008 12:34PM
To:            [Redacted]
Cc:            Miller, Bradley; Harris, Tony
Subject:    perform

As instructed all appraisal that are rated higher than a successful overall will have to be redone and scored no higher than a successful rating per Brad.

Please get this done ASAP

Mike Howell
VPS

Excellent.  That's precisely the way almost everyone understands that rating systems like this work, yet rarely do we get so succinct and accurate an admission of the system's operation.  It would almost be funny if it didn't actually affect the lives of hard-working real people.

Congratulations to all the lucky employees who earned scores higher than successful but got arbitrarily knocked down to a lower rating, and who'll probably lose out on discretionary pay increases as a result.