Adjusting To Agendas Meetings Offer A Chance To Relax And Let Your Mind Wander

Donuts! Coffee! A refreshing nap, perhaps!

Don’t you just love meetings? I mean, to me, meetings are just the ticket when I need a vacation, but can’t afford a trip to the Poconos - when I don’t feel like working, but can’t take time off.

“Go to a meeting!” I always tell my burned-out friends. “Keep score while others bicker over petty issues, enjoy some lovely refreshments, write letters, plan a party. Just make sure that you rub your eyes wearily, from time to time, and lean back in your chair pensively once in awhile, and tap your pencil eraser on the table intensely, now and then, as if you’re about to produce some genius idea.”

Most people don’t like to admit this.

They like to believe that meetings are such hard work that you have to keep replenishing your bodily fluids, which is why there’s always a pitcher of water on the table.

Which is unfortunate because - true story - once I knocked over my glass of water during a particularly intense meeting, and the water spread like some kind of giant science fiction amoeba. A lot of dark suits were scrambling to save their papers from the flood damage.

“Let’s not cry over spilled water,” I offered convivially.

You can’t believe the looks I got. Fortunately, they were mostly from the sort of people who were always writing superfluous memos with a lot of run-on sentences, and taking reports home on weekends, so I shrugged it off.

Obviously, they’d never worked in the State Department, which is where I first learned about meeting fun.

For one thing, nothing was ever accomplished. Which may have had something to do with the fact that weekly State Department staff meetings consisted of approximately 475 people, all of whom were deathly afraid of missing any opportunity to brown-nose with an assistant-to-theassistant-to-the-assistant deputy secretary of state.

“What did you learn today?” I once asked my colleague Paul after our weekly staff meeting.

“That Mavis has really gross, yellow toenails,” he said.

He was referring to our boss, Mavis, whose name has been changed to protect me from being sued for revealing government secrets.

Yes, Mavis often wore open-toed shoes, thereby giving us something to stare at, and be entertained by, during meetings.

And once, after a press conference, which is nothing more than a meeting with reporters, I asked Paul the same question:

“What did you learn in the press conference?”

“That Karen has really bad body odor,” he said, referring to another colleague of ours, whose name has been changed because I think she’s at the CIA now. “I think you’re exaggerating,” my husband said, speaking via satellite from Jupiter. “All meetings aren’t that bad. In fact, a lot of meetings are useful, productive and informative.” What a kidder.

I mean, a bright guy by all standardized test methods, my husband suffers from this idealistic, but delusional notion, that meetings should follow an agenda, that only those people who will directly contribute to, or significantly benefit from, the stated agenda should attend, that the discussion should stay focused, decisions made and tasks accomplished. Hmmm.

“How was your big meeting with Ray?” I asked him recently after he met with the chief financial officer at a major corporation.

“Terrible. He ate donuts, drank coffee, then went to sleep,” he said. “Once I looked over at him and his eyes were rolling back into his head.”

Hey! I wish I’d been there!