Meetings

Bet you any money you complain about meetings. Bet you any money you moan about how some of them are a waste of time, are too long, don’t allow people a chance to air their views, allow people too much of a chance to air their views, infringe on your desire to get home early, feel repetitive and stale and completely lack any opportunities for anyone to make jokes.

Get a grip. The only reason why you moan about meetings is because they are called meetings. If someone said, “Can you come along and a few of us will chat about this,” then it wouldn’t feel so bad.

But as soon as you give something a name, it becomes a thing. And things are not always good. Things are like monsters, that stalk you and catch up with you and then sometimes even you send a monster after other people, even though you know everybody hates monsters.

Meetings. They’re things. In fact, they’re things with tassels. There are little things attached to the thing that you call a meeting. Such as an agenda.

Agendas are the things with the fewest words that still always get printed on A4. Despite this, you’ll abbreviate the last item as AOB, because God forbid you write “Any Other Business” and take up too much room on the big, Arctic landscape that is your A4 agenda.

Ouch, there’s another thing. An item. Items on an agenda. Tassels on tassels. In normal life, an item is either a piece of clothing (if you’re a woman) or a couple who are in love, co-habit or at least attend weekly social events together (if, again, you’re a woman. Men only use the word item in reference to agendas.)

Another tassel is the minutes. Formal meetings will always start with item one, issues from the previous minutes; which means, let’s just check if:

§ The person taking the minutes of the last meeting exhibited symptoms of a pulse at any moment during it;
§ The discussion ended with something of some worth actually being said;
§ The moment at which someone farted, suggested another person was thick or dribbled onto their tie mid-sentence was recorded just to spice up the dull monotony of the subject matter.

Minutes also remind us of those tassels we call “actions.” Like the word “minute”, the noun “action” transforms itself incongruously into a verb in your meeting:

Teacher 1: Could you minute that please.
Minute-taker: Write it down you mean?
Teacher 1: Yes, minute it, so that someone can action it next week.
Minute-taker: Do it?
Teacher 1: Yes, do it!
Teacher 2: Once they’ve actioned it, do you want them to evidence it as well?
Teacher 1: Let’s agenda that item for the next meeting.

Even the person in charge of the meeting is said to be “chairing it.” Chair is a noun for fuck’s sake!

The real worry regarding literacy in schools is not so much the inability of children to spell, but the fact that teachers, through over-exposure to meetings, can be conditioned into erroneously selecting nouns to deploy as verbs. This can spill over into everyday life and have potentially disastrous consequences for our relationships:

Teacher (in pub, to friends): My turn to round us all then.
Friend: Round us? Do you mean, buy a round?
Teacher: Yeah, once I’ve toileted myself and mobiled my girlfriend.
Friend: Er..OK.
Teacher: Let me agenda what you want from the bar and I’ll conversation it to the barman and money him what he requires.
Friend: Oh, Twat off!

Once you’ve extracted all the verb-disguised-nouns and the endless clichés – which I won’t even get started on, I’ll wait for another time and “hit the ground running” – then all you’re left with are the anecdotes and the silences.

If it’s a nice cuddly meeting, a few departmental colleagues, people who are relaxed and want to unwind, then you get anecdotes. Nothing like agreeing with someone’s point by recounting an entire dialogue you had while telling off some miscreant earlier that day, one of those right fucking boring “I said-he said” monologues.

If, however, it’s a bit more high-powered and a larger forum, perhaps all the middle managers (or leaders, duh) then it’s less relaxed and the anecdotes are withheld leaving only silences. One of those silences like crucifixion, where you can get tinitis from the sound of someone scratching their balls. There’s nothing like saying something in one of those meetings, followed by a nervous, “Any questions?” or “What do other people think?” to be met with a line of faces more expressionless than a police suspect line-up.

At which point the person chairing the meeting says, “For the minutes, none of us could care less.”