Taking a Meeting
I think that when you become a manager all you really do is go to meetings. I never know exactly what a manager does. They seem to either be planning things for meetings or reviewing things in preparation of meetings. What I love are the people who go to meetings to prepare for meetings and then have meetings after the meetings to “debrief.”
What do managers do in all of these meetings? The worst are the managers meetings where only managers meet. These are the meetings where they essentially decide how to better screw up your work day and make things more difficult for you, the regular worker, so that they can then schedule meetings with a lot of PowerPoint slides and use a lot of buzz words and business speak. Sometimes they have presentations that go on for twenty or thirty pages full of words that have no meaning. They could just sum up the entire meeting in two seconds by saying, “hello everyone, we had a meeting and your life is going to get a lot more complicated and you are going to have to work much harder. Good luck.”
It must have something to do with the heads being up the hind-end thing that managers go through. Since they are so desperately stumbling around blindly all they really want to do is get together and comfort each other. They shout out words that make no sense and then they nod, as much as their heads can given where they are wedged, and then pass rules that make no sense.
“Metrics,” will spew one and then the rest will nod.
“Leverage,” will say another, gravely and they will shake their heads.
“Kitty,” will say the dumbest of them all and then be sent back down to work in a call center.
Meetings are dull. Good Lord in heaven are meetings dull. No matter what the manager does to try to make the meeting fun or interesting it generally amounts, half way through, to my wishing I could gouge my eyes out with my pen. Basically meetings are about business. Business, let’s face it, is boring. No matter what your business is and what you do when it comes down to the bottom line business is about numbers. Nobody finds numbers interesting. Numbers are boring. The only person that ever thought they were interesting was that mathematician guy, John Nash, from “A Beautiful Mind” and let’s not forget he is insane.
Sometimes meetings can be beneficial to employees depending on what kind of meetings they are. For example, the company I work for likes to have these quarterly meetings where they talk about quarterly results. It goes on for what seems like four hundred and fifty thousand years and people get up and drone on and on and on. I have, however, discovered some things you can do during these to help pass the time. One of my favorites is to compose haikus.
A man keeps talking
He says nothing important
Someone shoot me please
I often cover the entire three by five card they provide for you to write down questions on with haikus. It’s a lot of fun especially when you share them with friends afterwards. Try it at your next meeting.
One of the best things is to walk into a large meeting room or cafeteria and finding that the lights are set low and that there is a screen set up. This means that they are going to keep the lights dim and you can catch up on some quality sleep time. There is nothing better than getting some sleep during the middle of the work day. You can rest your chin on your hand and you will look like a dark shape in the darkness that is listening intently. The manager need never know you are dozing nicely and dreaming about being anywhere else but in a meeting about quarterly results that no one cares about.
One of the best things I ever saw about meetings was in a comic strip. Members prepared for the meeting by distributing BINGO-style cards covered with business buzz words. Whenever the manager spoke a buzz word you marked it on your card until you got BINGO. For me, this is really the only true purpose for a meeting.
I don’t think I have ever been to a meeting where anything gets accomplished. Most of the time it just leads to more meetings where nothing gets done. Eventually you just dump all of the actual work on someone’s desk and hope they can get it done before you have to go to the next meeting.
I was in the meeting just today that was so boring it was a struggle to keep my eyes open. I was leaning back against a filing cabinet and wishing to God that a meteor would just hit the building and kill everyone. Something. Anything. A fire. A flood. Just anything that would stop the incessant droning and meaningless talk.
That kind of stuff just never happens when you really want it to. I should probably take a meeting with someone about that.
