We have a client that we produce catalogs, ads, guides and other things for. Right now they have a big new product release going on, and we’re doing about a dozen different things for them. They (or at least their marketing wing) are the biggest collective of time-sucking uselessness ever to walk the earth.
The main manager we’ve had to deal with so far has no family, no friends, no concept of other people’s time, and no ability to come to a decision. She called us up to schedule a meeting to discuss the copy on a two-page flyer, saying she’d show up at our office at 7pm. She then called at 6:30 to say she’d be in at 7:30. At 7:30 she called to say she’d be there at 8:30. She showed up at 9. She then proceeded to dither, nitpick, fret, waver, muse, whine, mope and steadily gnaw away at our sanity…
How about those concalls scheduled for first thing Friday morning in New York…that’s like 10 pm Friday night my time jerkwad.
I try to schedule 30 minute internal meetings. We get just as much accomplished as a full morning because we zero in on the important stuff and don’t rat hole on the shit.
I go to bumfuck all the time for meetings, but that’s with customers.
I’m probably going to beijing next week on an overniter for a 60 minute meeting…that could be done by email if people decided to be professional and just get it done.
You just made my Quantitative Analysis teacher look good. Guy was as boring as… as… as a meeting between Finance and Engineering with no interpreter, but he knew it.
The first day of the year he gave us photocopies of every slide he was going to show. One slide per page. Some of them had a single small formula, or a three line drawing. This was a 9-month course, 5 hours a week. We always got him at 2nd hour; attendance (60%) was required by college rules but even so you basically went there and slept/played cards/played sink the fleet/played chess. I kind of crammed his slides up: the original stack was several inches, the one I ended up with is less than 50 pages. And what you actually had to study was the book.
One day he adressed a girl in the back of the class, “miss Martínez, could you please give a soft nudge to Mister… I think it’s Mr Sánchez, yes, Mr Sánchez, please? His snores are so loud the first row students can’t hear.” :eek:
After being nudged gently, Mister Sánchez shuffled position a bit and stoped snoring to much.
Fuck that. I won’t even attent meeting close to the end of the business day. I’d never make it as a salaryman in Japan, if that’s the kind of shit that would be expected of me.
Hee, at least he was polite about it. I really did have a prof who used to keep a tennis ball in his desk to throw at sleeping people. In his defense, I don’t know how you could sleep in his class. For one thing he knew everyone’s name. But the other thing was he made basic chem pretty interesting - he’d run back and forth, and get so excited about the things he was doing that it made it almost fun.
Almost.
I’m sure I’ve posted this before, but fuck it, I’m posting it again.
The worst meeting I’ve ever attended at least had good food. It was catered. Three times. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Fourteen hours. Of stupid.
Remember the NPR Ladies skit on SNL? The one with Ana Gasteyer and Molly Shannon? Where they would dully and unexcitedly say things like “I’m excited”? Where boring and catatonic was the entire joke?
The reason it worked was because it was performed by two accomplished and talented comediennes, who performed a script by talented comedy writers. Even then, they could only keepo it up for maybe three minutes.
Now imagine two women who have zero comic talent and no script, doing this act to convey projected earnings and balance sheets. For TWO FUCKING HOURS.
And there is the most infuriating part of Meetings From Hell. They usually are necessary in order to get a number of people in sync. But when you know that the information you need could’ve been presented and over with in five minutes but the damn thing drags on for hours and hours … that’s when you want to kill someone.
Honestly, which do you think is worse, the Meeting From Hades[sup]tm[/sup] or Being Told to Do EXACTLY What You Are Already Doing[/sup]? I’m curious because one meeting I attended a few months ago was the former and it was dedicated to the latter. I spent a few minutes trying to find the local law on Justifiable Homicide. Luckily, I no longer work at that place.
I can top that. Picture the first two hours of the first day of a new job. Picture those two hours of a meeting where you are told that you are not doing your job. Picture being threatened with termination for it.
You’re telling me you walked in the door for your very first day and before being shown your desk or anything you were taken to a meeting where you were chewed out for not doing your job??!?!?!? :eek:
Four days? Shit, I wouldn’t have lasted the meeting.
It took that long for me to pick my jaw up off the floor.
The guy was a real piece of work. He told us that he hated repeating himself, and that we should write down everything he said so he wouldn’t have to. So if you did, he’d speak so fast that you couldn’t write it all down. Then if you asked for clarification, or for him to slow down, he’d holler at you to write it down.
Believe me, if it weren’t for the money, I’d have left by now and gone back to teaching. Thankfully, I have a boss who firmly believes in a) charging extra for aggravation, and b) sharing the wealth with his employees. To be honest, it gives me a kind of perverse pleasure now to sit in those meetings with her and think about how mercilessly we’re billing her for all this crap. What makes it even more fun is that another manager in her company has hired us on a side project specifically for the purpose of undermining her and and getting her whole team fired.
:eek: I’m afraid I might be This Person. Everyone else kind of sits there while I ask questions, and I worry that I am dragging things out, things that everyone else already understood in a snap. But my boss seems to think I am not completely wasting time. Who knows…but now I am a little more paranoid.
