Shut up!

Kids, I know you’ve been here: 42-minutes into a scheduled 60-minute meeting and the conversation’s winding down. Maybe the boss is nearing the end of her soporific about taking your ethics training or updating your professional profile. You feel the end of the meeting coming on. You wonder if you’ll have time to get a cuppa joe. Heck, maybe you’ll even get to go to the bathroom before the start of your next meeting.

And then the boss issues the killing words, “Anybody have anything else?” or, even worse, “Let’s do a quick roundtable.”

OMG! I feel the hairs on the back of my neck rising. No! not a roundtable. Because you know no one but me is going to say, “Nothing new to report, my projects are moving along on schedule.” Oh, no. Everyone’s got to sound busy, officious, important. It has to seem like everyone’s thinking really hard, solving crises, or critically needing the boss to help them resolve an issue.

If you’re on the phone, you can roll your eyes a few times. I find that helps relieve stress. But if you’re all in a room together, it’s deadly. Then you have to look politely around as everyone yawps on about Bill not completing his dashboard items or Phyllis forgetting to contact the lawyers. [Is anyone named Phyllis anymore?]

Sometimes in meetings like that I imagine my coworkers as children, or more precisely what they were like as children. It’s easy with the engineers: they’re exactly as they are now, only smaller. [Ha! That’ll get ya to comment, won’t it, TA?] The marketeers probably all had red hair and freckles and had trouble sitting still. And the finance people…hum, tell the truth, I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a meeting with a bunch of finance people. There’s usually just the one—who tells you you can’t do what you want to do. Bored, detached, oh so fed up with you all. Or was that the attorney? And we all know what the attorneys looked like when they were children, don’t we?

What do you think?