Meeting Season

I read somewhere that that an average person spends over an eighth of his life sleeping.As you may have already gathered, I’m very fond of sleeping; sleeping is one of my favorite activities.But it’s kind of different when you realize that you’ve wasted a good chunk of your life sleeping, you end up asking yourself if it was even worth it.

Ever notice how old people end up sleeping less and less?Some people would argue that this is a natural process aging people undergo but if you ask me, they’re just astute to this whole sham life plays on us.

I’m only starting to realize this now; I used to be sixteen and all of a sudden, I wake up and I’m twenty-three.How did that happen?But then again, I wasted a good piece of my life on other things as well like waiting to get my driver’s license renewed in that cruddy government office or waiting in line behind some old lady at the convenience store counter while she probes her purse for coins.

To sum it all up, it’s true.I’ve wasted an eighth of my life.Well if it’s any consolation, I still have the remaining parts of my life to do whatever I want with.Except for the parts where I end up wasting more time in meetings.

Meetings, they say, play an important part in the corporate world and I’m sure they do sometimes; more often than not though they turn out to be a pointless waste of time.I try to avert attending meetings but somehow I always get sucked in.“You have to be there, I want to hear comments on how these reports look like on Marketing’s vantage point.� Fuck it.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a good employee, but I want my day to be like every other office day–everyone else scurrying around the office frantically while I calmly take a nap behind the closed door of my office, or disappear for hours on end to watch a movie or have coffee.I want the time between my late arrival in the office to my audaciously early departure a few hours later to be uninterrupted by these bureaucratic machinations…

Sometime last week, I got stuck in this meeting with a couple of bigwigs from operations.I walk in the conference room and sat down in front of the conference table where a piece of paper detailing the agenda of the meeting lay neatly.I browsed through it and I shit you not, the purpose of this entire meeting was to make sure more meetings occur in the future.It’s one of those things where they want to make sure that supervisors and their subordinates spend enough time together to talk about their broken marriages or favorite colors.

I’m pretty sure all this is being done to bump up another mid management hotshot to directorship.I don’t have any idea who this guy’s going to be but he’s one lucky mother fucker and I’d love to have his job.Imagine—Bartholomew Bubblegum, Managing director for meetings and unimportant events.

I could almost imagine the memos Bartholomew Bubblegum’s going to send out:

From: Bubblegum, Bartholomew
To: Marketing; IT; Human Resources; Database; Accounts Management
CC: Operations; Quality; VP for International Operations
Subject: To Be Announced

Hi Everyone,

Please attend the meeting tomorrow at 4:00pm Eastern Standard Time.I don’t have an idea as to what we’re going to meet about yet but I’m sure we’ll come up with something!Bring your notebooks!

Cheerfully yours!

Bartholomew Bubblegum
Managing Director for Meetings
and Unimportant Events (MDMUE)

I’m quite certain I’m not the only one who feels this way because looking around the conference room at most people’s notebooks usually reveal just how much they get from these meetings.I mean, everyone shows up to attend the meeting with their fancy notebooks and expensive pens but nobody really takes notes using them do they?Upon closer inspection of my colleagues’ notebooks, I found hundreds of empty pages with three lines tops written at the top of each page.

It’s easy to deduce that those hundreds of empty pages represent hundreds of past meetings just like this one I’m about to attend where they didn’t take notes either.

<img>

I look at my own notebook and see that even if there were things written on my notebook, they are things that have nothing to do with the meeting at hand but rather random things I write down in the course trying to drudge my way through this god awfully boring thing:

1.) Get new PS2 games over the weekend

2.) Stop biting fingernails

3.) Update blog

4.) Why are her tits so perky?It’s not cold in here is it?It’s like they want to get out from under her bra and wave hello to everyone in the room.I think they’re waving at me. ‘Hello Mike!’

5.) Resist urge to wave back

Sometimes I’m amused at how I could write thinly veiled stories about work.I won’t be surprised when the day comes that, as Heather Armstrong so eloquently puts it, I get DOOCED.