Stage I: Happiness. I’m out of the office, I might get to drive somewhere, which is fun. Before stuff begins, I can make jokes and catch up with people I may not normally see daily. We’re building space-stuff, this is a cool collection of companies, I don’t mind working here. Meetings aren’t the end of the world.
Stage II: Awakening. Oh sweet Jeebuz this is gonna be one boring meeting. He printed the PowerPoint slides. Why? I can see the slides on the projection screen. Notes? If you need to take notes, you don’t understand the project. You take notes to CYA, not to actually get anything done. These people don’t have a clue what’s going on, they just have a job title that requires them to ask questions that nobody cares about and make recommendations that don’t add any value to the project. Two hours? I’ll never make it…
Stage III: Death. The eyelids refuse to stay open, breathing grows shallow, limbs begin to droop. Sleep, this is a meeting-induced coma. I could be outside, I could be driving somewhere, I could be job hunting. I could be playing with my son, or watching Battlefield Commanders on the DVR. I could be a productive member of society instead of my @ss falling asleep and my head snapping back as I attempt to remain awake.
Stage IV: Anger. These {expletive (plural) deleted}. These people are a waste of oxygen. They’re killing me, taking the best years of my life, time away from my family, making me answer insipid questions in exchange for money. I could live off the land; I don’t need this! I hate you all, I hate this industry, I hate slides, I hate project managers who only know how to maneuver the esoteric and hidden lanes of communication that gets a project done but who add no real value to anything! I keel jou!
Stage V: Flight. It’s over? I can leave? You’ll never find me again. I’ll cut off my phone, I’ll never check email, I’ll never click “Accept” again. Build whatever you want, I don’t care what requirements it omits or standards it doesn’t meet. Build an audio amplifier into the power supply, put a magnetron behind the hard drive, put a lit propane torch on top of the keyboard, I won’t say anything.
“Mr. Howell, you’re taking a lot of notes, do you have something to add before we adjourn?”
“Um… No. I think you’ve covered the details I had questions about nicely, thanks.”
“OK, the next project requirements review meeting will be…”
I need a quieter keyboard or lighter fingers.
Heh, I feel ya here. Kinda like doing Preventative Maintenance in the Military and all the hoops you go through just to scratch your own arse.
Where i work now, they typically have meetings to prepare for meetings… for instance: A meeting with the regional president for my company requires a department meeting to perform a “dry run” for the meeting. Ugg.
Meetings with more than 2 people need to be either tightly managed or socially entertaining.
Other than that they get either boring or simply become a useless waste of time- something to wave at you later on the lines of “but we said it in the meeting”.
People hardly ever come to a meeting all ready and prepared and in order to get the meeting to be productive you need to keep a fast pace of relevant subjects – kinda like the pace to use when you give a lecture – 2 minutes presenting something before you get to actually discuss it interactively is long. 20 minutes is far far too long, 2 hours is forever and you totally lost your audiance about 118 minutes ago.
Its a pity most people do not realize that saying something in front of other people is not the same as getting them to be interested in it/understand it/respond to it in a productive kind of way.
ah well.
you can always torture them back by inviting them to your meetings…
lol you just flawlessly described my 8th grade math class o,O
except you forgot the evil person(?) in charge
where is catbert when you need him?
That’s meetings in the corporate world, fo’ shizzle….
As always, the twist ending is the best part [side note: typing in abject anger could contribute to the increased volume of the keystrokes]. Loved yer writing style since BRK, love to see the new posts here when yer schedule permits. Oh, & had to go re-read the “Airman Howell” archives in its entirety after the second one ye re-posted here. In spite of my lack of military training of any sort, those were some of my favorite posts.
Part of Stage III: Death is the soul sucking. They always steal just a little more of your soul at every meeting. I think they use it like Gelfling Essence in an attempt to revive CEOs.
This is standard meeting procedure for corporate meetings, nothing out of the ordinary here.
My take on meetings (and I have a crap tonne of them) is that they are convened by managers in an effort to make themselves feel validated and useful. Rarely is anything presented in a meeting that couldn’t be covered nicely in an email.
The real exercise of a meeting is for people to learn how to say the same thing in many different ways with the assumption that the more words used the more important the person must be.
Meetings are also the things you do in which you talk about work rather than actually doing work. They help keep you behind schedule.
BRK as Dilbert.
I had a Pre-Bid meeting for a Federally-funded project this morning. Fortunately for me, I was one of the speakers. Unfortunately, my job usually bores the living crap out of everyone else. Fortunately, I’m a considerate sod so I tried to cut my part of the meeting as short as possible. Unfortunately, I still found myself obligated to quote verbatim several State and Federal Regulations. Fortunately, the actual talking part of the meeting was over inside the hour, and when we resumed after a 10 minute break only a couple of people had questions. Even more fortunately, after everyone left there were still coffee and danishes left over. I love meetings
I’m not so sure other people love my meetings though…
Reminds me of the old joke in my military days:
“Six Phases of a Project”
Phase 1: Excitement
Phase 2: Disillusionment
Phase 3: Panic
Phase 4: Search for the Guilty
Phase 5: Punishment of the Innocent
Phase 6: Praise and Honor for the Non-participants
ah Mike- that I Idd golden
Ugh,
No thank you, absolutely not. Is that whats waiting for us military guys in the real world? I’ll just stick with turning my wrenches all the same.
I think we all feel the same way about meetings, no matter what they are about they always degenerate into stupid people asking silly questions that they have no interest in the answers to but feel they should ask.
Its even worse when its a meeting with customers and you have to be nice and pretend that they have a clue about anything.
http://images.despair.com/products/demotivators/meetings.jpg
None of us as as dumb as all of us.
And “Amen” to people asking questions because their titles make them think they must. In larger meetings, I wonder whether the questions are less about the content, and more about “I’d better make sure the big boss noticed *I* was involved.”
This is why people invented Bullshit-Bingo!!!
Bullshit-Bingo!!! YESSS!!!! makes any meeting a great time
Ah Noah, you forget though that the purpose of a meeting is to cover something but not have it in actual writing. This way, when the big wigs change it, they can claim it was never that way in the first place. We had an HR director claim that our performance reviews would be used to decide if we got raises. Then, he claimed he never said that, they were really just there to make sure we got “positive feedback”. ‘course, he seems to have forgotten that since we’re the IT people, we film all our meetings with HR so we can web cast it later. Still didn’t get any raises but at least we could prove he’s a liar. At minute 6 and 7 seconds and minute 22 and 13 seconds…
saphia, you remind me of some of the BOFH archives where the redundant rs232 (now would be cat5/5e/6) cabling to the office has excellent aural capabilities.
(they wired a mic in the spare port)
Just wait… At least they’re not using buzzwords like they’re going out of style.
If I hear Synergy in a meeting one more time… I may just destroy the Internet!
I remember a 2nd LT complaining that he was so fed up with Powerpoint he was going to get out and become a contractor. Oh, how this Lockheed employee laughed!
Wow, thanks for pointing out BS Bingo. I’m the conference room guy at my workplace and that is hilarious.
Ahahaha, wow.
Do NOT – and I can’t stress the negative enough – take a job in academia. Our meetings are competitive events and should be recognized as such by the NCAA as a sport. If there were any justice, I’d be able to recruit for my meeting minions. I would give their grandmothers free Hummers and use my discretionary budget to pay their mortgages. I would be able to hand-pick my prospects and redshirt them until they’re ready for the upper-management big time. That would be the sauce, but OH NO.
hahaha were you at least blogging during the meeting?
I feel you on so many of your comments…but would like to add a couple:
1. The meeting that drones on for hours, then ends…no one has talked to you, nothing on the Big Screen has had a thing to do with your work…”why was I here?”
2. Dirty Laundry – two folks just start to get into it on some small point, and it quickly becomes obvious to everyone else in the room, with a growing sense of unease, that these two just don’t like each other and will fight like cats and dogs on the smallest thing – just because they can…
Oh well, dinner and a show, right?
Well, there are times when meetings can be entertaining. For example, hells corp-my former work place-held a crap load of meetings that didnt have any point to them….I would know…I had to play records keeper every damn time we had one >.=)
the second…deals with INS and it’s ICE officials after a raid…and someone (*coughcough*) saying that it was about time they did said raid….
I often wish I could on invent a digital meeting cost display
that gets mounted on the wall next to the clock: it’s purpose
is to calculate the salary cost of a meeting & to display the
running total after 10 minutes. Maybe add a chip to the id
badge of every participant, so the salary data could be
easily transmitted. Program it to calculate the sum of the
wage x minutesfor every participant. Imagine seeing those
numbers spin around the dial! My guess is that it would
encourage brevity, cut down on stupid questions & we
wouldn’t have to worry about the sound of our
keyboards. No guarantees that the bullshit bingo will
be a thing of the past, though.
OMG I was in a meeting just this week where they calculated the cost of just this set of meetings was $20,000 a month. And yet they still have them ?!?!?!??!