I went to a meeting recently that was about as much fun as having hot needles poked into my eyes. Like many meetings, it was dominated by the person who called it. Unfortunately, she lacked the oratory skills of an Obama or Oprah and mumbled her way through a presentation in the manner of reading a telephone directory from front to back.
She wasn’t helped by her material, in fairness. It related to a directive which has come down to us from our global masters in New York instructing us minions in the far flung colonies to follow a new procedure. This involves a lot of pointless reporting which serves no purpose other than allowing a graduate trainee in the US to report that his project has been completed successfully.
Large corporations are full of this sort of internal balderdash, which keeps 80% of the staff busy while the other 20% try to service clients and earn revenue for the firm. Its capitalism, but not as we know it.
I do my best to ignore this sort of nonsense, in an effort to save my sanity. But occasionally I get dragged in unknowingly. I think accepting a meeting request might result in some nice pastries being placed on the table and a collegial chat ensuing between like minded people. Reality is cruelly different. Most meetings are called by lonely people in an attempt to bring a modicum of social activity into the humdrum emptiness of their lives.
They speak for twenty minutes (usually from a pre prepared text that they could have easily emailed to the meeting participants as an alternative to dragging them into a room) and then ask if there are any questions. I’m usually sleeping with my eyes open at this point, so I rarely come up with incisive queries. However, there are always those who need to hear their own voice at every gathering. They will ask the obvious and dumbest questions.
“Will we receive a copy of the presentation in soft format?”
“When will this be implemented?”
“Can you start again, I came in five minutes late and haven’t a clue what this is about?”
We managed to get through several of these dumb questions from all the usual suspects and this was followed by a pause when we hoped that paper would be shuffled and the host would thank us for our attendance. Instead she said “So does everyone agree that we should meet again at the same time next week?”
The collective sigh of the attendees was powerful enough to drive a sailboat. I thought about saying no, that another meeting would be a tragic vindication of the complete waste of time we had just sat through. But I didn’t, none of us want to tell the emperor that he is wearing no clothes.
I hoped that somebody else would protest but my fellow meeting attendees were busy examining the contents of their fingernails while chewing furiously on their lower lip. We all nodded agreement to this ridiculous suggestion and shuffled out and back to the solitude of our desk bound existence.
The following week was worse. This time we knew what was coming and had to fill ourselves with strong coffee beforehand to stay awake. Endless statistics were read out, acronyms that nobody understood were thrown around liberally and the previous week’s presentation was regurgitated in case we hadn’t enjoyed it enough the first time.
To amuse myself, I decided to watch the other attendees to see their reaction. Most were like me, bored to tears and searching for matchsticks to prop their eyelids open. There were the new kids on the block, furiously taking notes in blissful ignorance.
Then there were the ones who felt the need to say something every ten minutes just to prove that they were still awake. Their comments rarely extended beyond saying “Interesting” or “Is that a fact” and it did make me wonder if they were running an app on their iphones which transmitted a meaningless comment at regular intervals.
The worse participants were the ones who felt the need to make a constructive comment because this had implications for the rest of us. Overzealous control freaks like to take processes that are already bureaucratic monsters and add an extra layer of pointless paperwork.
“Why don’t we do a semi annual review to look at progress against targets”, one of them suggested while the rest of us exhaled loudly thinking about the two useless forms we would now have to complete each year. There is usually only one such freak at meetings, but at this one we were graced with two.
“Why don’t we do that in June and December” she said. For a moment, we thought she was joking, because 99% of semi annual reviews take place in those months and making that suggestion was akin to a proposal that a birthday party should be held on somebody’s actual birthday. If she’d suggested April and October, it would at least have been interesting, but no, she was saying it simply to have something to say.
We trudged out dolefully, clutching our handouts and mourning the hour of our lives that we would never get back. Perhaps the problem is that people don’t realise that the things that are important to them personally are not necessarily of interest to other people. I’d like to ask twelve people at work to attend a one hour presentation on the impact of jet engined aircraft on transatlantic travel in the 1960s. But I accept that anyone with a life would be reluctant to come along unless I dressed it up as a strategic planning session for 2013 expense optimisation.
That always gets people’s attention. Because while it will be mainly pointless and contain enough accounting jargon to lull a rave dancer into deep slumber, it will at least have pastries. Any meeting to discuss expense reduction has to involve pastries. Because cutting them from future meetings will always be on the agenda.
