Seriously, does anyone accomplish anything in a meeting that lasts longer than an hour or two? I can’t even fathom what people would need to talk about for nine hours straight. Yet, there it is on my appointment calendar — a 9 hour meeting. Worse, my boss insists that I attend.
Honest to God, I cannot think of any way more depressing or agonizing to spend my day than trapped in a small windowless room with a group of people I wouldn’t otherwise talk to on purpose with no laptop, no phone, no knitting, no comfortable seating discussing a project workplan for a project my Integration group has minimal involvement in. Oh, yes, the whole purpose of this meeting is to review every agonizing infinitesimal detail of work that has yet to be done, to analyze what day each minuscule task will be started and how many minutes it will take each person involved, to set preposterous deadlines guaranteeing there will be more high stress project workplan review meetings in the future for excuse-making and finger -pointing and, yes, more analysis of dates and minutes and tasks and even more bewildering deadlines.
I’ve never been shy about my opinion about meetings. I find the time involved extremely unproductive. I’m really a person who prefers to just “do the work” rather than “discuss doing the work”. I have often found that the more you discuss doing the work, the less gets done. My opinion of of the ratio of discussion to work is the same as my opinion of the length of an email signature to an actual email. The first should never be longer than the latter or you’ve missed the point.
I also get bored really easy if the discussion isn’t about me. I actually don’t attend very many meetings in person but rather phone in so I can work while the rest of the attendees can talk about all of their non-Integration issues — everything from where they are going to place the computers on the unit to the color of the font on the screen, but the minute they have a question about data crossing from our demographics system or our ordering system to their new application, I’m right there with my headset on perkier than ever. In fact, some units have never seen me in person but think I am like Bill Gates.
I tried to get out of attending this 9 hour meeting. I figured I had a good reason since Integration’s actual involvement is minimal; in fact, for the most part, the project is just a nuisance to us as we now have to find some software that will take some Groupwise emails and send them to our pagers rather than have actual people copy and paste them into a pager application and page us manually. I can’t imagine spending 9 hours discussing that.
But apparently while I was away in New Mexico, some office politics and toe-stepping went on and this now is a sensitive subject. No one in our division is going to look like she isn’t giving the project 100% of her attention. This is the result of the fact that the Manager of the division that this project actually affects the most couldn’t be bothered to show up at the first workplan review, which was only scheduled for 2 hours. So now I’m being punished.
There is no way I’m going to make it through two hours let alone 9 hours. No amount of caffeine will help. I’m going to be doing the head bob trying to keep my eyes open while my brain goes numb. I’m fairly sure they have laws against cruel and unusual punishment, don’t they? I keep hoping for a pardon.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hmm…this sounds suspiciously like a meeting that would take place at the company that I work for.
9 freaking hours?! I start to hyperventilate thinking about a 1-hour meeting. My ADD has no tolerance for meetings past 1 hour. I feel your pain, and I wish you luck.
Lulu’s last blog post..Come On Say It, Say I’m a Bird!
They managed to use every single minute of it too, even the lunch bit. And while I appreciate that lunch was provided, once again, no one considered the fact that there was a vegetarian in the room and I had to pick the meat off of my sandwich. I find it very strange and rude because there are quite a few of us in this department.
My fibromyalgia was set into high gear by lunch time too thanks to the uncomfortable conference room furniture. I can’t figure out why my office chair is less stressful to my body.
I still can’t figure out how we could talk about a workplan all day. It was one of the very rare times I wished I could get email on my Palm Pilot and oddly because I wanted to do some real work by getting some answers to some questions I had about various projects.
Doesn’t sound like a very good day AT ALL. I hope that your weekend goes much better!
Lulu’s last blog post..Come On Say It, Say I’m a Bird!
I’ve always said that my own personal version of hell would be a nine-hour legal meeting.
Robin’s last blog post..No Knead Beer Bread