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I've just sat through a two and a half hour meeting where the total outcome of combined intellect was:

"If the warehouse needs to be opened at 7.30am instead of 8.00am, then by rights the warehouse manager needs to be there at 7.30am to open it"

ARRRRGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGGGHGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

That's 150 minutes of my life just flushed down the bog once again. Why do you mock me oh mighty Thor! Are you not appeased with my weekly sacrifices of Christian monks, and the wild boar I commend to the flames in your name!?

I guess you're the warehouse manager then?

I would not piss off Odin by cursing his son.

The warehouse manager is a harmless old soul, but do we really need 8 people to work out that he may need to come in early when we need the doors unlocked early? Does anyone else ever suffer these pointless discussions?!

Are you complaining about meetings? Yea much like chocolate is proof of the existence of God, meetings are proof of the existence of the devil.

Meetings are unconscious tributes to the Great Nurgle.

I think those kind of meetings are a corporate thing. My company deosn't even bother holding meetings over the important stuff.

Correct, the important stuff just gets sorted out quickly and efficiently because the MD can't be arsed sitting in the meeting room all afternoon.

The slightly off-topic, non-essential business however (should we get the vans washed by a company who comes to work, a bit expensive but easy for everyone, or should we get coupons for the car wash place down the road! Woo hoo!) can take hours upon hours of chatter.

Oh thats nothing. I used to spend 3 hours in a meeting every week, where my only input was to restate exactly the same information the board in the Managers office had on it. The same board I updated with every progression of my department.

3 hours. A week. And then the cheeky cow demands I waste less time?

My supervisor, that I might see once a month, has told me about the three to four hour meeting where all they really determine is that they need to have another meeting. Your tax dollars at work.

One place I worked at, the CEO figured out meetings were a huge drain on all our time, which everyone agreed with. So the CEO told his directors he would be monitoring use of the meeting rooms to see if time was cut down. The director then passed this down to the business unit managers (presumably in a meeting). In my business unit we cleverly solved the problem by just not using the meeting room, but sitting at our desks (open office) and shouting our discussion points. At least it stopped people using powerpoint.

Another business unit just stopped having meetings. All information was communicated by chinese whispers, with the team leader telling people one at a time, and then seeing it get disseminated out into the unit.

So at least in that case it wasn't just that meetings were bad, it's just that the overwhelming majority of my work colleagues were really stupid people.

In my company meetings are plagued by two additional dangers:

1. People being late, thus wasting the time of everyone who came on time, and making their next bit of work late.

2. Going off on tangents to the real topic.

In my own little team I rarely hold meetings. Some of them are tightly organised around a single project, and some of them are 'tea time' meetings with cakes, when we formulate strategy.

Remember a meeting at the barracks 12 hours after the attacks on 9/11. We all have been on alert, securing the installation and listening to the radio. My Captain's said, "I have called you all here to inform you that we have been attack. That is all." No sherlock! God where does the Army find them?

The meeting I love in the civilian word is a meeting to plan a future meeting which will plan a meeting. I you not. No wonder the company had to lay off 5000 people because of cost over runs.

drakedeming wrote:I would not piss off Odin

I wouldn't piss off Brian Blessed at all ! He might sit on you.

I just remembered a meeting we had when I was Commissary Driver for a large airline that had West in it's name. It wasn't a waste of time because it was so amusing. The health inspector stopped by and found somethings wrong on the night shift but had to be adressed to all the employees:
1. The health inspector found some hairs and a male organ shaped dent in some food.
2. That if employees felt the need to have sex at work not to do it on the box of napkins eventhough it was the softest place in the commissary.
3. On the same subject the employees were to refrain from using the latex gloves as condom and then putting them back in the box when they have been used.
and lastly
4. Employees need to refrain from s ing on the wall in the restroom.

Talk about a great meeting. Everyone on day shift was laughing but our commissary manager.

I've found that the agenda (and any actual work to be done) for most meetings is ironed out long before hand and that most meetings are an excuse to get out of the office, drink coffee/consume donuts, and then get someone else to buy you lunch.

I really like it when we have a plant "tour". We sit and listen to their pitch, get some exercise by walking around (it's generally too noisy to actually retain the tour guides info), stop at the workstations of any attractive females, then go out to lunch on the hosting companies dime.

Sometimes I love work.

Back in the store we had a meeting every Monday morning, the boss would go over the weekly numbers, the proposed projections and other crap involving lots of numbers. Usually we'd just look at his forehead and judge from his frowning how good or bad things were.

BrookM wrote:Back in the store we had a meeting every Monday morning, the boss would go over the weekly numbers, the proposed projections and other crap involving lots of numbers. Usually we'd just look at his forehead and judge from his frowning how good or bad things were.

Snap! Except our boss slowly goes red in the face, and if things are really bad, he pinches the brow of his nose whilst going red. We think it helps to stop the sides of his head exploding outwards in a cloud of superheated steam.

When its really bad, he pinches brow, goes red, and mutters "No no no no no no" over whatever it is that you're trying to explain. We consider it much like an air-raid siren, and everyone not involved in the conversation evacuates the room.

I don't know who first said it, but...

"meetings, none of us are as dumb as all of us"

My company used to not have meetings. Then we hired five more people who like to have meetings. Oddly enough, the company started making less money around that time.