Holy shit, you people have never worked with architects. Or MBA candidates. Holy fucking shit is that painful.
I got in trouble once for putting my head down on the table and falling asleep. This was, of course, in a meeting of our entire office (then about 10 people). Good thing I was damn valuable to the company or else I would have been gone. Not to say that I didn’t learn my lesson - from then on if I nodded off, so long as I was sitting in the back and stayed in my chair, no one bothered me (oh yeah…no way to earn the enimity of your coworkers by falling asleep when others fear…).
What’s with Smart Screens (or whatever those glorified TVs are called)? It’s still PowerPoint you fucking fake-ass accented boob.
I tell you though, our CEO learned how to use his Blackberry like a fucking weapon - working with City folk who will never put anything in writing (and guess who writes the minutes…), he found that if you tapped away and looked up to acknowledge the speaker every few minutes, pointing your magic Blackberry at the new speaker you could steer the conversation in whatever way you wanted.
The PDA is another great tool for this. So long as you curse and pretend to furiously rescratch something in it, you can get some actual work done. If you’re really slick, meetings are great places to catch up.
Or end up with what we eventually found out was the result of the Blackberry Gambit:
You might have your secretary or a trusted colleague have you paged for some “emergency” about 1/2 hour into the meeting. Then you get credit for showing up; you are seen by all as the go-to girl; and you don’t have to deal with the meeting.
And the envious looks on peoples’ faces as you gather up your papers and leave are priceless.
Jodi, I have a simple solution for you: do not put up with meetings that last longer than an hour unless they are productive.
If you are lucky enough to run a meeting, try scheduling for an hour, but standing up at the 45-minute point, even if doing so interrupts someone mid-sentence. Don’t walk out – just stand. It’s an amazing physical cue that shakes people out of their idiocy. A supervisor at my last workplace used to insist that everyone in the room stand once the 45-minute point had passed. He rarely had a meeting go more than an hour. Unfortunately, this is tough when you’re not running the show.
If you’re not running the meeting, bring a tablet of notepaper with the questions you expect to have answered written on the first page (I say this because most dreadful gov’t meetings are brain-dumps with useless PowerPoint shows intended to get three or fewer fabulously dull points across). If you can get one ahead of time, bring the a printout of Summary slide from the PowerPoint presentation, and annotate each segment with the questions you have. At the one hour point, if you’ve still not written down answers to any of your questions, set your notes and the almost-entirely-blank notepad down in your chair as though going to the bathroom. Leave. Do not return.
If you work in government, there are plenty of pads of paper around. If not, it’s worth $20 to buy a pile of them and keep them at your desk. For five minutes’ worth of meeting prep, you get to leave a decoy and return to your useful work. If your supervisor gives you any shit, be frank with them: you don’t waste the taxpayers’ money by sitting in a meeting where your particular expertise isn’t needed. Since you work in gov’t, the odds of them managing to fire you are pretty slim.
I remember once reading about a company (sorry can’t recall who) that held meetings in a conference room without chairs. Most meetings lasted 20 minutes max.
You know, I managed to staple my own thumb, many years ago. It really, really, really hurt. Hurt even more when it came time to pull the staple out.
Now I’m all grown up and a veteran of many meetings. A stapling death is too good for pointless meeting perpetrators.
When I’m in pointless meetings I like to play Plan the Perfect Murder. So far I’ve managed to knock off (in my imagination of course) two people and get away with it. Too bad neither of the two were the originators of the meetings.
Ah yes, the time-tested “have your secretary call with an emergency” routine.
One time when I was working in downtown D.C., the circus was coming to town and the circus parade was going to go right by our building. With elephants. My boss wanted to see the elephants.
So she got called out of her boring partners’ meeting for a “conference call.” And then she came down and joined us in playing with the clowns. A more fitting end to a partners’ meeting I have yet to discover.
“Have everyone in the meeting stand up.” Works good until the guy in the wheelchair shows up.
Everyday, I search the online Wall Street Journal. I find articles of interest, don’t read them and save them in one document. When I have pointless meeting I print it off and read it. At least it give me something to do and it looks like I’m reading work stuff.
I’ve also cultivated a reputation as “the guy who keeps us on track”. I’ll interrupt a boring speaker to ask the pertinent question, even if it’s, “And where is all this going? Are we going to make a decision today?” Thankfully, my cow-orkers than do follow-up questions or opinions to divert the speaker.
If all else fails, my cow-orkers and I play games like:
Count how many times the boss says, “I” when he should say, “we”,
How often will the assistant boss use the phrase, “Let me give you an example . . .”
How long until (elder secretary) starts to fall asleep?
Whistlepig
Unless I am certain a meeting is important to me, I just don’t show up.
If they hold up the meeting long enough to call me and see where I am then I know I should be there. (I don’t actually answer the phone; I recognize the caller ID and head right over.)
I almost never schedule a meeting for longer than 30 minutes, though I always book the room for an hour. That way I can cut the meeting off at 30 if it has covered the bases (95% of the time), but if it goes longer it will be because the attendees feel the need to stay.
Back in the day when I was a suit, A meeting with Corporate types, my boss, and me took place. The Corporates explained that installation labor had to be held, even though sales division had just posted their best year. Furthermore, I was expected to reduce overtime, and effect a reduction in borrowed personnel from service division. They asked me what I thought.
My replay was that that last time I’d read of a similar proposal, it involved maintaining existing brick production, while gathering their own straw. “What would you like first, gentlemen? Darkness or locusts?”
My boss looked at the floor. I grinned. The company lasted another year and a half.
Our new General Manager, a god among men (and soft on the eyes to boot), called a mandatory meeting in December to announce that Fridays were now “meeting free.” NO ONE could call a meeting on Friday as that was to be reserved for actual work.
He also announced that if anyone wanted to meet with him in the future, he’d be available on a walk-in basis on Mondays and that: a) it had better be important enough to pull him away from the 350 e-mails he’d be forced to read because people didn’t know how to effectively use e-mail, and please, for the love of all that is holy, do NOT copy him unless you wanted him to take specific action; and b) it had better be concise as he didn’t have all day to wade through bullshit. He’d stop short of setting the timer for 5 minutes, but if he looked at the clock more than once, you’d better damn well start summarizing.
He said his next dept meeting would be in February where he’d unveil his new plan of using e-mail.
When they get the bugs worked out of the human cloning process, I nominate this guy for unlimited clones. For that matter, tell him to run for president. Hell, I’d vote for him, not even knowing his position on any of the issues, just because he seems to have some good sense.
I don’t work for the U.S. Government. I’m not a federal employee, I’m a county employee. Not that it matters, but I wouldn’t want to mislead anyone.
But IME most governments have about the same ratio of people who’d rather navel-gaze than work. For most of those people, meetings are the preferred means of work-avoidance because they let you “work” without actually doing any work. Which is precisely why I hate them.
Are you insinuating that this method of holding meetings isn’t acceptable according to the ADA and everyone should be forced to go to a series of meetings on how to more compassionatley deal with the Disabled in a professional business setting and then hold a series of regular work meetings to show that the lessons have been learned?
Ah, to me it’s all the same. But it was actually County government that I had the experience with, having a SO who worked for one County in one state, then moved to my state and wound up working for another County. Hours are 7:30-4:00, and he has to leave at 4:00; they lock the doors and wait outside if someone has to come pick them up.