Why Meetings Bother Me

We had another all-staff meeting today at work. All-staff meetings are painful, because it's a collection of about fifty people in one room and the objective is to get them all on the same page about some grand vision that the CEO and the board of trustees has formed.

Without question, the meeting fails. This is because of a random sampling of fifty employees at my organization, at least one of them is going to be so completely, totally, astronomically out-of-touch with it that they're going to grind the meeting to a halt with a dumb question. This damages the meeting by creating a sudden and irreversible shift in direction that causes the meeting to lose its focus and momentum, thusly fumbling the topic from, oh, I don't know, let's say FISCAL SOLVENCY, to fuckin' what makes windmills turn. I shit you not. The problem as I see it is that our organization relies heavily on part-time and volunteer staff, many of whom are retirees looking for a neat way to spend their autumn years without having to proverbially stay hungry about their work. And, since these seniors are staff, they turn up at the all-staff meeting and I don't think they give a shit about the graphs with the big red bars on them since they already have their nest eggs or what-not. So, without fail, at around the thirty-five minute mark, the intelligent, informal Q&A atmosphere dissolves as some part-timer raises his wrinkled bony hand and says something like "I think we need more publicity because I was watchin' Charles Kuralt the other night and there was a piece about the Yarn Festival, that's the one down in Akron, and...."

At this point, the all-staff meeting skips tracks and becomes a sick performance piece with a title like "Rockin' on the Porch with Old Man Carruthers". It's not just me. I asked my boss if he noticed this characteristic loss of focus in all of our meetings, and he agreed without hesitation. Now, I'm not saying that the elderly do not have anything to contribute to our meetings, but they certainly have not proved themselves able to contribute anything relevant. I honestly think they find these meetings the only opportunity to get their questions answered about minor trivia about the building. They may honestly believe that there is no one better suited to answer this trivia than the president of the company who, God love her, handles these bonehead questions very diplomatically and never, as I would do without a second thought, sprays the offending employee down with assault rifle fire. If they're not asking dumb questions, they're giving dumb advice. Not once has anyone from our marketing department stood up and said "Publicity! Of course! We do need some of that! Thanks!"

It would be nice to have just one all-staff meeting where we stay on topic for the entire time. I don't believe this is possible since, as I've stated, a random sampling of 50 employees will always produce at least one person who is so completely clueless that any and all attempts to get them on the same page will fail. Miserably. Like "Tell me again why we let Hellen Keller fly the airplane?" failure. I think it's actually corrosive to the morale of the staff to show up at a meeting and have some long-winded zonk start waxing philosophical about some irrelevant detail regarding the second-floor men's room. People just start to tune out and get bored, and once that interest is lost, it's gone forever. I'm fairly confident that we'd have better meetings if food wasn't provided. I'm sure a lot of people just show up for the danishes and coffee, and those people just don't care what's going to happen. No coffee, no leeches taking up space. The all-staff meeting should only be for people who still give a damn about this place, but I'm afraid if that happened it would just be me, about five other people, and the sycophants who follow them around all day.