220725 Perception

The word perception has more than one meaning.
#1 is in the sense of being able to see something that will happen a moment, a day or a year ahead to an event that will happen. I had known Joyce for little more than a month when I saw us standing in a church, me in a navy dress blue uniform and Joyce in a white outfit with a white fur like neck. This was before I enlisted in the navy and hadn’t even decided to do so. 7 months later, much to the disdain of our parents, we were in the exact church I envisioned and wearing what I had seen months earlier. I do not have control of this, it just happens at times.
The #2 way perception is used in the workplace by the people who hire and fire employees and by the way your immediate supervisor percieves you. I have seen this in action more times than I can count. For instance when I first applied for a job at Litton in Springfield. I went in for an interview. I was wearing dress slacks, white shirt and a tie with a jacket. The man who was hiring looked at me and perceived that I was out of place. This was a factory; people applied for jobs in t-shirts and jeans. We spoke briefly and he gave me a quick tour of what and where the job would be done. I didn’t get the job.
I have worked aboard ships for 4 years, was in an aircrew for 1 year, was a training instructor for 4 years and was a trainee for 1.5 years during my navy enlistments, worked at an auto parts store for .3 years, repaired TV sets for 3 years, worked in an electronic engineering lab for 5 years, worked in a data center on mainframe computers for 4.8 years at the same company and my last job was in the reliability lab and the microsection lab at Litton for 19.5 years. Everywhere I worked at very different jobs I found out the same thing applied. It is more important what your supervisor perceives you to be than what your job performance is in reality. I have always worked and done more than I had to do for any job I have had, but that didn’t matter if your boss did not think well of you. I can’t begin to count how many supervisors I have worked under and the one thing that mattered was how he or she perceived me to be, not the amount of dedication and work produced. Everywhere I worked I saw examples of hard workers passed over for promotions and salary increases based solely on what the supervisor perceived them to be instead of what they really were. In nearly every case a lesser qualified worker got the promotion because the supervisor liked them personally, not because they were good at the job but because the boss thought he or she was a good guy or gal.