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The Useless Meeting Wack Jobs
$$$$$exyGal writes "Have you ever attended a useless meeting? Are you the wack job who always ask the same (or random) question during an all hands with the hope that simply by asking, you're going to change something? Rands in Repose points out the difference between an informational meeting and a conflict resolution meeting."
I usually ask "Why are we having this meeting? No. Really". It never gets answered satisfactorily. Am I asking anything wrong??
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Full House! Man, I love Buzzword Bingo... and that article pretty much filled my card up.
... the infamous 'Pre-meeting meeting' though.. *shudders*
God, I love being the boss.
Signed,
Your Crazy English Boss
The last meeting I attended was to decide our companies mission statement. I used something from Dilbert's mission statement generator and won!
We take bets on how times my boss will say Action Item, Paradigm Shift and Mission Statement.
Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?
Bored during meetings? Why not try some of these neat little exercises, not only will it make meetings more interesting but your fellow workmates will become suddenly more alert and maintain a respectful distance:
During a meeting:
Discreetly clasp the hold of someone's hand and whisper "Can you feel it?" from the corner of your mouth.
Draw enormous genitalia on your notepad and discreetly show it to the person next to you for their approval.
When refreshments are presented, immediately distribute one biscuit to each of the attendees then systematically smash each one with your fist in front of them.
Wear a hand free phone headset throughout. Once in a while drift off into an unrelated conversation, such as "I don't care if there are no dwarfs, just get the show done!"
Write the words 'he fancies you' on your pad and show it to the person next to you while indicating with your pen.
Respond to a serious question with "I don't know what to say, obviously I'm flattered, but it's all happened so fast.
Use 'Nam style jargon' such as 'what's the ETA?', 'who's on recon?' and 'Charlie don't surf!'
Reconstruct the meeting in front of you using action figures and when anyone moves re-arrange the figures accordingly.
Shave one of your forearms.
Draw a chalk circle around one of the chairs then avoid sitting on it when the meeting starts. When someone does eventually sit on it, cover your mouth and gasp.
Turn your back on the meeting and sit facing the window with your legs stretched out. Announce that 'you love this dirty old town!'
Walk directly up to a colleague and stand nose to nose with him/her for one minute.
Mount the desk and walk along it's length before taking your seat.
Reflect sunlight into everyone's eyes off your watch face.
Gargle with water.
Repeat every idea they express in a baby voice while moving your hand like a chattering mouth.
Gradually push yourself closer and closer to the door on your chair.
Hum throughout.
Pull out a large roll of bank notes and count them demonstratively.
Bend momentarily under the table then emerge wearing contact lenses that white out your eyes.
Drop meaningless and confusing management speak into conversations such as:
'What's the margin, Marvin?'
'When's this turkey going to get basted?'
'If we don't get this brook babbling we're all going to end up looking like doe-eyed Labradors'
Produce a hamster from your pocket and suggest throwing it to one another as a means of idea-exchange.
Use a large hunting knife to point at your visual aids.
Announce that you've run off some copies of the meeting agenda for everyone. Then hand out pieces of paper that read:
My Secret Agenda
1. Trample the weak
2. Triumph alone
3. Invade Poland
Recollect them sheepishly and ask everyone to pretend they haven't seen them.
Attempt to hypnotise the entire room using a pocket watch.
Leave long pauses in your speech at random moments. When someone is prompted to interject shout 'I AM NOT FINISHED'.
I've never shoed a horse, but I once told a donkey to piss off!
Actually, sometimes meetings serve a purpose. Or are planned that way. Sure, you could argue that we could have cleared the same question by email instead of having a two-hour meeting, but still. We could have just stuck to the point, explained the architecture to the client, or viceversa, answered a few questions, and been done with it.
But no. What I hate is the wiseguy that just has to ask _something_, _anything_, just to show participation. Among my "favourites" are(favourite poster children for euthanasia, that is):
- people who ask something that's been said before. Repeatedly. Bonus points if it's something obvious.
(Yes, for the 5'th time, we _are_ saving the data in an Oracle database.)
- people who, obviously, are stuck in a "misunderstand it" mental mode.
(E.g., no, just because there are two columns in the table, it doesn't mean you can only store two attributes. There's a reason why those two columns are called "key" and "value". It's for storing as many key/value pairs as you need. No, seriously. You can stop asking "what if we later need more than two attributes?")
- people who take some irrelevant detail -- often a tangent or metaphor used -- and, by Jove, they have to get that detail cleared out in detail.
(E.g., if we're discussing the workflow engine, you can jolly well stop picking on the exact font used in the dummy screenshots. Yes, you'll get any font you want, but you'll get it from the GUI team. Can we move ahead already?)
- the more extreme case of the above: people who ask something completely unrelated and completely irrelevant.
(Believe it or not, the "anyone else likes wood?" from a Dilbert strip actually happens in some real meetings. Just replace "wood" by some other completely irrelevant topic.)
- the client PHB who just is affraid to reach a conclusion, and instead just _has_ to show that he/she/it manages. So each time he/she/it will want something else wantonly changed.
(E.g., dude, we already gave you a template editor for those reports. Can we please, please, please not go yet again into whether to use landscape or portrait? Just use the editor and print them diagonally, for all I care.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Let us not forget the "team-building" meeting. Nothing like hanging out with people from work that I can barely tolerate during the work day on my own time. Yay!
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
Are you Lonely ?
Don't like working on your own ?
Hate Making Decisions ?
Then Call a Meeting !!!!
YOU CAN...
- SEE people
- DRAW Flowcharts
- FEEL Important
- IMPRESS your collegues
All on Company TimeMEETINGS
The pratical alternative to work.
In most cases, the proper translation is "We haven't made plans to lay anyone off yet because upper managment is still fighting it out. Once we figure out who won the power struggle, anyone hired by the losing side gets the axe." The other possible intrepretation is "We're so incompetent that we can't even figure out what redundant positions exist in the two organizations. Once we grow a clue we might be able to make some plans, if we can find someone with enough balls to actually make a decision."
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I do desktop support and at one job I was asked to go to about 8 hours worth of database meetings each week that I had nothing to do with. For the first couple of weeks, I tried to pay attention and input my opinion, but I found I really had no opinion on what they were doing with the various tables. I was sort of upset that I couldn't actually be doing work during this time but the boss insisted that the entire team be there.
Eventually I settled into playing chess on my palm Pilot at all these meetings. Eventually, somebody raised a questions about what was said several hours earlier in th meeting and somebody said "Ask Marc, he's taking notes." While I was slowly realizig they were talking about me and came out of my chess game, my co-worker looked over at what I was doing and anounced "He's playing chess!" Everybody just shruggd and went back tot he meeting. From then on I stopped gong to said meetings and stayed in the office doing work and nobody ever ever bothered me about it.