Meeting Survival 101

We all have professional quirks. Mine?  i become deeply irritated with people who fall asleep in meetings.  It’s rude and unprofessional…

…and sometimes damn near impossible to avoid, especially after a long night of drinking and silliness with colleagues day of travel.  Such was the case today.  I found myself pulling every trick from my arsenal to keep my head from nodding like a dunking bird.  Much to my surprise, by the end of the day, i’d actually stumbled onto something useful…

First were the easy ‘standards’ — mostly “mathematics-based”.  First, count ceiling tiles, then calculate the square footage of the ceiling (no calculator, that’s cheating!).  The advanced version of this includes calculating the square footage of ceiling tiles, which means subtracting lighting fixtures, air vents, etc.  Today’s tally?  572 square feet of area, with only 488 squre feet of tile (big lights, lots of vents!).

The next tactic is more practical — calculating the volume of the coffee urn. If you remember your geometry, V=Bxh.   The really important calculation involves determining how much coffee remains in the pot, but this requires more vigilance.  This is particularly useful if you are trying to snag the coveted ‘second-to-last’ cup, which provides something less than sludge, and side-steps the obligation to make the next pot.

Burning through the math tricks, i moved onto the category of ‘playing games with my body’.  No, not like that…. that’s in my arsenal of ‘tricks to get fired’.   This involves bio-feedback.  For example, i tried to will my left leg to go to sleep.  After failing that, i attempted to convince my stomache to rumble.  The more advanced version of this is to entice your intestines to generate some aromatic effluent (for use in the elevator later).  But i tired of this as well.

Along these lines, i practiced crossing my eyes – one at at time.  This is one of my favorite stage tricks, primarily used for comedic roles and death scenes.  I was concerned that the others in the meeting might think i was having a stroke, so i quit that after a few attempts.

From there, on to the arena of “fantasies about the other attendees”.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t a single ‘do-able’ human in the room.  Senior level geeks and dinks, preening, snoring, drooling and pontificating about obtuse technical minutae couldn’t be any less attractive unless they all had festering open wounds, so that wasn’t the game du jour.  Instead, i opted for the ‘undershorts’ game – where i guess what kind of underwear is beneath the suit.  It started off ok: “boxers, boxers, briefs, Depends, boxers, commando…..” Ewww…. i stopped before i got to the gent who i’ve always suspected wears his wife’s lacy panties.  This was not helping.  Back to math…

The most demoralizing of the games: What’s it costing?  If you estimate salaries for all attendees, and factor in travel/support costs, it is always alarming.  Today’s meeting, fairly high level muckety-mucks, was pricey…. almost 30 attendees, 8 hours, 20 traveled in for the event.  Over $40,000.  Yikes… makes the eyes water and the brain wander.

“Holy Budget Hemorrhage, Batman!  What kind of amazing Video Teleconference (VTC) capability could i purchase for that kind of scratch?  Even the best VTC systems don’t really work well where interaction is required…” 

[light bulb goes off over my head – bright enough to nearly wake up the man sleeping next to me]

Eureka!  What if we take the best of interactive gaming, and turn that into an ‘active avatar-based’ VTC system?  Kinda like “Wii Meetings”?  Each attendee would have an avatar/”Mii”.  All attendees would wear a simple sensor, which would allow the avatar to mimic body movement/posture.  When the attendee gesticulates, the avatar moves too.  Sleeping?  The avatar’s little head starts to nod.  An eyeroll?  Hey, isn’t that the best part of a meeting?  Looking around to see who your allies are when the windbags are dropping steamers on the conference table?

So, by the time i was done writing all this down, it was 6:00 pm, and the meeting was over! 

In addition to my clever ‘invention’, i also added a new tool to my arsenal.  Spending part of a meeting furiously jotting down your daily blog post, with a serious look on your face, will convince your colleagues that you’re the most clever and engaged person in the room.  Which is ok, until they ask you for a copy of your notes on the way out the door…