Work is full of meetings. I have been pretty fortunate to avoid a lot of them. I have one morning meeting every day that lasts all of 15 minutes and it's nothing more than a game plan for the day. Not too bad. However, I find there are a large number of meetings that aren't so short and sweet.
I was invited to a meeting this week with various customers to discuss delivery time line and installation issues of our product via teleconference. It being a teleconference should tip you off that this will not be a short meeting and in fact, we will probably struggle to stay within our time limits. This meeting was scheduled for an hour with an agenda of 22 points with about 4-5 groups dialed in (another red flag). At the thirty minute mark, we were on point number 4. I found this quite funny. Shortly after that thirty minutes, the people on the other end of the phone were having some nonsense conversation that didn't pertain to us so we had our own mini meeting, which I am sorry to say happens ALL the time with teleconferences. You can't see your attendees faces or their body language to signal to you that's not ok. So after about 10 minutes, we notice the phone has gone silent and someone says, "Hello?" This is where you have to make a graceful recovery to tell the people on the other end they were boring you, so you decided to talk about something else. Meeting fail.
At the end of our one hour, they had made it to point 6, but by the grace of gods, the conference room we had was only booked for an hour and we got kicked out. The main meeting people went to an office to finish what was probably another hour or two conversation and my boss and I left to go do "real work".
So why does this happen? I think it happens for a few reasons. One - Meetings are a chance for people to vent in an open forum. To bring up points they think are huge because it's eating away at them. Then you need to spend 5 minutes explaining they are smoking crack in a nice way and move on. Two - no one really wants to go back to work. If they are in a meeting, they can't possible be doing other things or meeting with OTHER people. The invention of the blackberry has kind of lessened this, but still, I think for people like us underlings, it's still valid. And finally, I believe that people running meetings have some phenomenon happen where time stops for them and they haven't the foggiest clue that life is happening around them back in normal land. Those who run meetings often determine their outcome and sad to say, many people are not good at it.
I am not saying, the meetings I run are perfect because they aren't. I just thought it was a funny observation that I could share with you. :) It's kind of like Office Space, probably a little to close to home. ;)
