Monday, March 30, 2009

Monday Office Beatings

Just a quick post because I want to stay in the habit of posting, daily if possible, while managing to do all the other evening stuff I want or need to do. Work can and probably will upend this goal, but I'll do my best!

If you follow my fledgling Twitter feed, you saw my note about Monday meetings being soul-sucking machinations of hell that need to be purged from the face of the earth. My fave rave are meetings to plan future meetings. Yes, those do happen. Driving home tonight I thought about the process of meetings in the corporate world and wondered how they came to such a horrible state. (A reason does exist for my renaming "meetings" to "beatings.") Honestly, they must have had a valid use when they were instituted, so why are so many of them such brutal wastes of time now? I blame two factors:
• Dead Weight Wally and his girlfriend Wilma
• Management fads created to sell lobotomizingly boring books

Dead Weight Wally and Wilma
You know who I'm talking about because you work with them, too. These are the people who never actually produce any work: just lots of emails and teleconferences pointing out the obvious actions that "someone" needs to perform, while avoiding said actions, which amazingly are in their job description; agreeing with anything senior management says, regardless of how stupid it is; and blustering about their current workload, which of course is on the path to "very promising" results. I nominate these people for getting shoved out the door first during the zombie apocalypse.

Management Fads
You know about these because they've infested every freaking industry known to man. From fast food chains to hospitals, middle managers are spoon fed heaping piles of tripe from the latest best seller. While I admit that the fast food folks might find a use for moving their cheese, the rest of us could really care less if George McGorge is a certified Wide 7 Alpha Blue Belt studying to upgrade his status to mauve. George and his compatriots like to schedule meetings and then monopolize the talk time so no one else can communicate. Some shred of useful information might pass from one level to the next, and we can't have that! Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that some of these techniques are good and valid. Some of us are just tired of mucking through the Swamp of Ridiculous Expectations to get the gems we need to do our own work.

Obviously, other factors have dragged the once-noble meeting down the path of suckery, but those two are the ones that itch me at the moment. We may revisit this topic at a later date. In closing, I'll just say this to the people who turn meetings into beatings: "You are two-legged pussbags from hell. Please shut up and motate off a cliff so the rest of us can actually work when we're at work. Thank you." ~H

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