Rotten tomatoes

I have reached a point where I now react in the extremes if I hear crap that’s a waste of collective time. And by that, I just mean wasteful meetings. I get irritated, or switch off completely or just start getting hysterical, like I did today. I amuse myself by finding double meanings in every second word uttered (and therefore going into hysterics) or texting friends who share my sentiment or just pretending how nice it would be if I could just state my mind and shock the hell out of everyone. Not that I haven’t done the latter sometimes, though I have done it so politely that some of the intended recipients didn’t even get it. But that’s another story.

When people are starting out in their career, I can understand how this may happen – you are so focused on achieving your daily tasks and targets that the finer points of working just pass you by. How to schedule a meeting, how to starts it well, how to structure it (or consciously avoid structure if that’s the need), how to make sure that the meeting adds value in some form of the other, how to optimize the time of a group…these are things that usually get hammered into us through trial and error and the feedback of supervisors and/or stakeholders. Sometimes in a written form, which can be very embarassing.

Apparently, some people didn’t have that tough a life. They have gone through life without getting a rap on the knuckles every time they started a group meeting without a clear agenda…or spent 30 min discussing the potential topics for another meeting of 60 min planned two days later…or joined an important 10 min late, for the fourth recurring instance…or got started on their presentation without bothering to learn the context…and the list goes on.

So how does this work? First - I am the one who gets rapped on the knuckles as I grow up, and over a period of time start understanding how to utilize my and people’s time effectively and conduct meetings of some value. Not that I am great at it, I do slip up, but I usually don’t have disaster meetings any more. Then again - once I am grown up, I am the one who is at the mercy of colleagues who didnt learn all those things and inflict these disaster meetings on me. And then of course I am the one who has to clean up and do damage control when meetings where I am an interested party get screwed up.

So basically, who’s the loser? Me. Maybe I deserve the rotten tomatoes and someone else’s having the last laugh.

Blah. It was a fucked up day anyway.