Some workplaces seriously have an addiction to meetings. My current workplace is just this kind of hell hole.
I have a lot of very important things to do today that are entirely un-work-related.
Here is what I want to do today:
I want to finish the next chapter of Inamorata. For you people. Because I care.
I want to work on the play I’m writing. It’s deep and depressing and does hideous things to my psyche. I absolutely love it.
I want to work on summaries and loglines. I hate doing this more than anything in the world, but it must be done.
I want to think about how I am going to spend my summer, whether I am going to try to get into a summer acting intensive, or if that time would be better spent paying off debt and waiting until fall.
Here is what I’m going to be doing today:
A meeting.
An all-day meeting.
A meeting where we are supposed to have questions and look interested. And it’s about insurance! I don’t even know that I can feign interest. And, yes, I can take in paper and write by hand, but it doesn’t change the fact that some chic is going to be yapping about insurance and there will be many many questions. There always are with these people.
Oh the agony!
April 8th, 2008 at 8:27 am
I really feel for you. I used to work in an office (much like “The Office”, we made business forms & had a lot of the useless work force seen in the show - I know, I was one of them!) & had a boss who was the product of the 1980s middle management boom. Nice guy but if he hadn’t been the husband of the owner’s wife’s friend (ah nepotism…), he’d've been gone long before I finally wised up & got outta there.
Anyway, he was the type who lived for meetings. If he could, he’d probably have scheduled all-day meetings for the entire week.
Recently, we had our weekly tech meeting which normally runs 45 minutes or so. This one started at 11 & ended about 1/2 hour before I left for the day. Naturally, it being Friday, I didn’t stick around late to do anything. But when I came back in Monday, I was swamped with the old work I hadn’t finished & the new crap being dumped on me. (The other techs were in the same boat.)
Our managers weren’t worried as they can work from home & got their piddling amount of paperwork finished - probably before I even left for my near-ritual Saturday morning breakfast outing.
Too bad you couldn’t just stick a tape recorder in there to record the event like guys did in large college lecture groups.
Hing in there, it’s almost Wednesday…
April 9th, 2008 at 6:18 am
And have you ever noticed that meetings seem to consist of an incredible amount of useless information? All yak. No substance.
No matter where it is in the world, I would like to be present for the meeting that consists of nothing but useful information, delivered in an effective way. Not that I particularly want to be present in any meeting, but this, for me, would be kind of like seeing Nessie. I want to believe that it is out there, but I’m not entirely convinced it exists.
And now it is Wednesday! Uh, hooray?
April 29th, 2008 at 1:18 am
An all day meeting about insurance? In God’s name, WHY??
We were supposed to have four seminars (one every three months) having to do with connecting with our customers (whoever we do work for) or more BS like that. We got through two of them and then haven’t heard anything about them in over a year. I guess people finally complained enough that they gave up. It was a complete waste of time.