Friday, July 25, 2003
I loves Me Some Meetings
“People love meetings.” That’s what a girl said to me last night after I asked her opinion on my high school reunion committee. Since about a year before the reunion, there have been 36,000 meetings.
It’s really overcomplicated. I was SO excited to look forward to seeing people again and catching up, but all this nonsense has really made my nostalgia dry up. I was debating about even going at this point.
Fortunately, the girls I was chatting with were enthusiastic and kind. I’m 90% sure I still want to go. The trouble is the meetings are held at unannounced times, not scheduled by any consensus. I’ve been out of town FOR REAL for most of them. Now that I’ve sold my car, I can’t get to say, Burke, VA without spending a lot of time and money.
Won’t go into the details. But unless they have a meeting somewhere in DC that I can get to, I’m not going. I fail to see what the meetings are about now, everything has been taken care of, with the exception of some pet projects that 2 people want, which is making things more expensive. Not enough people have bought tickets yet, so the whole thing might have to be canceled.
Sounds kind of like work, too much like work.
I am in meetings way too much. And the work generated by meetings is distracting from the ‘real’ work that needs to be done. I can be kept busy for days planning, writing things up, researching, and in the end it feels ephemeral.
I’m on committees. I’m a chairperson of a committee. It can be very interesting, even fun. In the critical view I’ve taken of time management and people time, 12 people meeting in a distant location to discuss the purchase of hotdog buns is plain dumb. And for this one chic, nothing but self-aggrandizing.
I wonder what she’s going through. Sometimes her emails are very nagging, in a mom or wife kind of way. Other times the tone rises to an electronic scream. She’s gotten very snappy with us as a group, and I’m sure not just me individually.
In my last exchange with her, I made suggestions about how to get these last ‘action items’ done via email or phone calls because it seems to be a problem for 80-90% of the people to get to meetings. She started her reply with “WELL THE PROBLEM WITH THAT IS...” nuf said.
Then in her most recent email, she’s having the meeting, but is plainly taking my suggestion that she shot rudely down when it was made.
“If you are unable to attend but would like to
>help out, please email us yet again and we will compile a special list of
>volunteers and assign you activities that we discuss at the meeting.”
I pity her. She seems like a really unhappy person, even worse than in high school. And she seems to be taking this reunion business really personally and way too far.
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