Briefcase blues
At one point it could have been nuclear missiles… television and rock music… an oil shortage perhaps… but now I’m sure that the one man-made construct that will bring humanity to its knees is in fact meetings.
In principle at least, sitting down and talking things out sounds like a good idea. Indeed, I imagine there are plenty of jobs where this is crucial. The problem appears when every level of manager believes that a meeting is necessary to validate their own employment.
I’ve attended meetings purely about the next meeting. It’s a fractal nightmare with more and more time being sunk into it.
The last place I worked had weekly production meetings. We would sit in a circle and take turns telling the boss about what we were up to. A pretty pointless endeavour that was only necessary since the boss had no idea what his workforce was actually doing. This was made worse since everyone was generally overworked – too overworked to have the time to sit there and listen to everyone else say how overworked they were… this in turn created a loss of time, thereby putting everyone under more pressure. As the pressure mounted, the boss resolved to have more of these meetings to sort it out… and then… well, I don’t know what happened, I left.
By my estimation we will reach total meeting grid-lock in under a decade. We’ll all be sat there having one last meeting about why the world has ground to a halt and why the end is suddenly nigh… I do hope there will be coffee and biscuits.
Regular office meetings are a complete waste of time.
Managers love them because they are “team building”
and bear the appearance of actually doing something.
Office gossip is a more effective form of communication.
“Office gossip is a more effective form of communication” – that and threatening post-it notes on co-workers desks.
Oh yes, I forgot the anonymously left post-it notes.
I anonomously re-post them to the water cooler for everyone to see.
I can imagine situations where zombies would be helpful. For instance in case of alien invasion, zombies would probably eat them and then zombies, not having ray guns, are slightly easier to deal with.
Ahh, Alien > Zombie > Human… the circle of life.
Unless the army of robots operate under Asimov’s Laws of AI, then I think you should maybe move them into the Things That Will Not Help column. We’ve all seen The Matrix.
I am constantly planning for a zombie or Death-Eater attack. The former is training from my first boy-friend, the latter is simply an extension of my life-long phobia of people breaking into my residence at night.
As much as I love killer robots, I have to agree that they probably belong in the “Things that will NOT help” column. Right now robot combatants are being developed, and I’m worried that they’re just going to make it even easier for rich countries to launch pointless wars. When the inevitable “collateral damage” happens, you can bet that the fact that the soldiers are robots will help the citizens of the invading country to feel no guilt at all over it. After all, who could have expected that robots would have a tough time distinguishing between enemy soldiers and buses full of orphans? It’s clearly not our fault.
That’s a pretty satute observation… when technology kills, no one is to blame.
I hate the phrase ‘collateral damage’ in reference to living things… it has a real ‘final solution’ ring to it.
a bunch of the freshmen class failed this year, so next school year every Friday all of us are to get split up into homeroom classes for school pride building games and whatnot.
the day after the administration announced it someone taped angry fliers all over the campus, supposedly a teacher
We have a meeting structure flow chart at work.
There are at least 3 weekly meetings I have to attend, one daily meeting and the occasional random meeting.
I love meetings.
But we don’t have coffee and biscuits at ours, maybe that is something that I need to work towards?
How can you love meetings when coffee and biscuits aren’t involved? I always thought of coffee and biscuits as the whole point of meetings.
The coffee and biscuits are essential.
They’re easy to love, if you can sleep with your eyes open.
Random site feed back: I really liked the names the comics in place of “previous” and “next” for the navigation buttons.
feedback is good… I liked that too, and I am working on restoring it…
OK, looks to be far trickier than I thought… really tricky…
It will get sorted, but for now I have added a ‘random comic’ link in the sidebar, at the top, just under the RSS thingy… as a form of distraction.
Every so often we get a beautiful, sunny, perfect day, and gas is just barely low enough for us to go drive a little without bankrupting ourselves. We head to the beach, where I pray that my former employers are stuck in meetings all day, and that it will start to rain just as they leave the office, and I feel vaguely evil, but in a good way.
My mum works in a company with two production meetings a day! They sit in a circle, and discuss all the errors that have gone wrong since the last production meeting (which was, at most, 18 hours ago), blame one another for the errors, file a report, and then never talk about it again, EXCEPT for the quarterly meeting where they discuss all of the reports that were never solved, and it starts all over again.
It’s a beautiful circle.
We used to have monthly meetings.
Once a month, we’d all put on suits and ties, stand around in a smoky bar for half an hour waiting for them to get started, listen as the minutes of the previous meeting were read out, vote that they were a true and accurate record of that meeting, stand around until they were convinced there was no other business and then end the meeting.
This means all we really did was confirm that we’d achieved nothing the previous month except to confirm that we’d achieved nothing the previous month except to confirm that we’d achieved nothing the previous month except to confirm that we’d achieved nothing the previous month except to confirm that we’d achieved nothing the previous month except to confirm that we’d achieved nothing the previous month … for most of two years, and they’re probably still at it now.
I tried to suggest that we not have another, but got hissed down because people felt I was wasting their time by prolonging the meeting.
Good grief, that sounds like some awful Kafka-esque nightmare.
Though you do have to give iy up for holding a business meeting in a bar.
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