That does it - no more management courses for you!! 
couple of things I do to pass the time:
- Mentally calculate the hourly cost of the meeting by adding up the participants salaries/fringes per hour;
- note, once again, the relative value of a presenters information is inversely proportional to the number of times they state “we have so much to cover”;
- and, for those trendy little 'aren’t we cute ‘cause our organization/program name is an acronym that spells something marginally related’, offer them my organizational card :
Stop
Using
Stupid
Acronyms
Now
Or, S.U.S.A.N. [sup]tm[/sup]
Win-win!!!
OK, that one made me scare the cats.
My company’s culture is meeting after meeting, as well. My pointy-haired boss has a weekly meeting so we can update him nd the rest of the group on the status of our various projects. He’s actually told me to drop critical support calls to come to these metings. The meetings themselves consist of me (and my colleagues) verbally recapping the current status of our projects while he types our comments into a sort of spreadsheet-based project tracker. He insists on weekly status updates via email. Why he doesn’t just copy and paste what I email to him, I can’t fathom. I literally dictate the text of my email to him so he can type it in.
I was in the middle of rebuilding our BlackBerry server once, and he pulled me off it to do the meeting. He agreed to let me give him my update first so I could get back to work. I said (no shit)
“I’m not doing any actual work today, I’m just going to meetings all day to talk about working.” He laughed. Hell, everyone laughed. I think that’s the day I signed my death warrant around here, though.
I was once in a meeting about meetings. The CEO said: “We’re wasting too much time having meetings. From now on, if you don’t feel your presence is necessary in a meeting, or you have nothing to contribute, then you should leave.”
I immediately stood up and walked out.
So was I. We watched a video on how the people who run meetings should have a clear presence and agenda. The people who ran it couldn’t think of a better topic, nor could they be bothered to even show up.
One of the worst meetings I was ever in, and I’ve been in a few, was one where a woman got up and literally read from her Power Point presentation. Each page had no pictures/charts/graphs or anything but just pages and pages of bullet points with long paragraphs after it. It was awful. She never raised her eyes to meet her audience so never saw our eyes glazing over or people falling asleep. She never noticed how restless and bored we were. No interaction, nothing.
Did you really?
If so, you are my new hero.
I genuinely did. I lasted another 4 years until I resigned of my own volition. He got fired 6 months later.
Ahh, NATO meetings. No Action, Talk Only.
That is sooooo cool.
It’s official, then: you’re my new hero.
Oh, and Idlewild? That was fucking hilarious - thanks for sharing!
Seconded. Brilliant. I shall be sharing that with the senior management at my new company…
Have you ever noticed that there’s one of these people in every single department? Maybe they should be put into one department so they can bore each other all day and let the rest of us get our work done.
Sure, it might rip a hole in the fabric of time and space and make the universe implode, but look on the bright side … no more meetings.
I always handle this situation in a simple and direct way. When asked or confronted as to why I didn’t do something, I just answer
“I was too busy sitting in YOUR meetings all day, all week.”
Do employers really do this? If so, what you should do is get a can of pinto beans. Sit in the bathroom. When there’s a pause in the conversation, press your lips against your arm and blow. Then throw a few pinto beans into the toilet. Grunt softly. Pant and blow just loud enought to be heard by everyone else. Repeat until excused.
You just described my entire semester in my Immunology class. To make it worse, the powerpoint slides were available online. Literally the only reasons I went to class were that I had other classes before and after in the same building and that the teacher occasionally gave pop quizzes so that we’d have a reason to come to class.
Oh, yes, she handed out the slides, too.
Ugh. I feel your pain.