Meetings

Why was I absolutely exhausted after 7 hours of inactivity in our annual Departmental away day today? I say 'away' when in actual fact we had it at the University on the 2nd floor of our building, as opposed to the 5th floor my Department occupies.

Am I the only one who finds such meetings as counter-productive as they are productive? Sure everyone gets the time to air their views and thoughts but little concrete invariably emerges from these things.

At one point today when I was beginning to lose the will to live I started wondering just how many millions of people were sat in meetings at that very moment all around the world? All those minutes and hours where productive workforces actually cease to be productive so they can, in most cases have discussions about how to be more productive!! I also began to think about all the coffee, tea, biscuits, finger food etc that such meetings and committees themselves generate.

Finally I began to wonder whether animals had meetings!! Dogs definitely not, monkeys? Possibly. Cats? for certain... plotting every night how they will take over the world come the Armageddon. But for the most part meetings are unlikely to be part of the animal kingdom's experience nor was primitive man in his cave worried about whether he needed to establish a criteria for selecting which animal he was going to kill for dinner tomorrow.


Clearly I spent too much time thinking about anything other than what I was supposed to be thinking about! Which is why when right-wing and left-wing nut jobs start spreading conspiracy theories about secret cabals meeting to plot the takeover of the world financial system/US government (insert as appropriate) they clearly have no experience of how they work. If there was a secret cabal plotting to bring about World Socialism they would still be on agenda item 1 -- minutes of the last meeting.