Dilbert has just invaded my office

In My Humble Opinion
1

So I walk in today and there’s a pile of work that needs to be done by noon. I’m not going to start it until 11, at the very earliest. Why? Because this morning I have a two hour mandatory meeting. Fortunately, it’s not on efficiency at the office, but it’s just as bad.
The first hour is devoted to 401k. Certainly that’s an important topic, but I don’t think we need an entire hour to for them to tell you “Tell us what you want us to take out of your paycheck, we’ll match X percent.” There. That took me one sentence. Maybe he’ll speak slowly.
The second hour is devoted to the employee stock ownership plan. It’s pretty cool actually. Those that have worked 1000 hours during the year get a certain percentage of their salary as a bonus towards stock options.
So what’s the problem? Our old company was bought out by a new one at the end of July. No one here can or will make 1000 hours until the end of 2001 unless they have a full month of overtime accrued between July and December. At the end of 2001, they just give it to us! We don’t need to sign up for anything. So basically, all they’re doing is taunting us today by showing us something we won’t see for another 14 months.

This meeting should take 10 minutes, not two hours.

So meanwhile, my work here piles up.

Not the greatest Dilbert story that’s out there, I’m sure, but it’s annoying to me. Who here has a better one?

2

But my Boss walks around holding his “Competition BMW” coffee mug all day just like in the movie “Office Space”. Makes me chuckle every time I see him strolling around talking bullshit.

3

I work at a software company. Whenever things get busy, like towards the end of a deadline, my boss decides that in order to stay on track, we must have DAILY meetings. So we get 10 or 12 developers in a room for anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours every day, talking about how to get our product out on time. Whenever I’ve mentioned that maybe actually WORKING on our work instead of TALKING about working on our work might serve us better, I’ve been shot down big time. He’s meeting happy. Just yesterday, we had a 2.5 hour meeting where the outcome was that I was going to write a bunch of code that needed to be done asap. Despite staying late last night, I couldn’t get it all done. I find out this morning that instead of being able to continue work on this stuff, I have to go to an all day meeting. ARRRGGHHH!!!

4

Every Tuesday, all the programmers converge for a floor meeting. As a meeting outline, we use printouts from the Microsoft Project thingie we are supposed to use and keep updated regarding our various projects and our progress within them.

a) We have one SQL person, one Oracle person, one Java person, and two Filemaker people, plus our supervisor. The SQL person doesn’t have the vaguest idea what the Oracle guru is talking about when discussing the Oracle projects and vice versa, nor do the FileMaker folk know what either of them is talking about, and so on.

b) Most of the discussion focuses on the correct versus incorrect entries in the Microsoft Project printout and how it should have been edited in order to reflect the actual state of projects. Therefore, if you think of Microsoft Project itself as a “metaproject”, discussion of the metaproject takes up the majority of our time and energy and constitutes the only subject matter which we can all understand.

“This query doesn’t properly assemble through the table’s primary key so it still reports spurious parameter errors.”

“Uh…is that similar to the problem we’re having where the plain text data source won’t import because Oracle’s columns weren’t set up as blobs?”

“Uh…is that the equivalent of doing a ‘find’ on related fields when the relationship doesn’t work in ‘find mode’ in FileMaker?”

“What’s ‘find mode’? Is that like a temporary parametric array?”

“Blobs are ‘binary large objects’, right? Are they local container fields, or global container fields?”

“Are those primary key values specific to the table row in the post-query array?”

“Ahem! You have that item marked as 90% complete. You really should have created subtasks…”

“Oh yeah”

“I thought we were supposed to put some percentage for each task that had been started”

(etc)

5

I worked at one place with a “Mission Statement” like he’s always mocking.

“We will do what it takes to make all our customers repeat customers.”

Wow. You went to B-skool for that?

6

Funny, I just read something about this a few days ago. Possible solutions to “Meeting fever” were:

  1. no Powerpoint presentations. keeps things simple

  2. no chairs, all attendees stand. amazing how it keeps the verbose and long-winded from rambling

and my favorite
3) a consultant charged double whenever he was required to attend a meeting. cut right down on those things

7

The place I work at is not quite as bad as that…at least I don’t have to tolerate meetings on a daily basis. But they are definitely meeting-mad here. Especially in the last week and a half. I recently figured that in the last five business days, I have lost 16 and a half hours out of a possible 40 business hours to meetings. God help me. The big one was last Friday, which was an all-staff meeting at the Institute, which lasted the entire day. Two days after that, there was an audiology meeting that lasted the entire morning. Looking at my schedule, I see that I’m going to lose next Wednesday afternoon (yes, all of it) to another freakin’ meeting.

The place I worked at before had one meeting per week, and it lasted one hour. Period. And somehow it got along better than where I work now.

It sucks. I hate this place. More meetings mean less time with patients, and less time that I’m in the same room with the clinic director, who is a cross between Kerry Weaver from “E.R.” and the Pointy-Haired Boss from “Dilbert.”

8

D’OH!

That last part should have read "More meetings mean less time with patients, and more time trapped with the clinic director, who is a cross between Kerry Weaver from “E.R.” and the Pointy-Haired Boss from “Dilbert.”