work: meet in the middle.

It's time for a new label as it is the first time I have tackled a topic to do with work.

In my line of work as a professional software developer, although there is nothing professional about the crappy code I develop, it is sometimes necessary to have meetings with other teams. In general this is a good thing as when working across teams, especially across continents, it is necessary to ensure everybody is on the 'same page' (sorry but there is likely to be a lot of management speak in this post). You need to 'run ideas up the flag pole and see if anybody salutes'.

But lately there have been more meetings than normal, lots of meetings, some very important meetings and some very boring, long boring tedious mind numbing meetings that make you just want to stand up and shout 'I don't give a flying <insert rude word here> about anything that is going on and I am now going to jump into the pond'. Indeed there sure have been a fair number of the not important type of meetings. The worst are when a secret cabal have had an important meeting that you weren't invited to and then invite you to a meeting that makes you want to explore the bottom of the nearest pond and keep mentioning things that happened in the important meeting but you have no idea about because you weren't in that important meeting and it just makes the boring meeting even more boring. And breath.

Let's say by some chance there is an interesting topic under discussion and due to it's complex nature it takes some time to 'fully explore every avenue'. An individual will say 'Let's take this offline' (talk about it outside of the meeting). What? Let's not discuss this topic during the meeting and instead discuss it outside of the meeting, why on earth would you do that, it makes no sense, you have specifically arranged a meeting to talk about things and then relegate talking about things to outside of the meeting. It boggles the mind!

Today I just lost it when during a discussion we were told that due to new rules the old way of doing things can't be used any more, but when asked what the new way is we were told 'That hasn't been decided yet'. Better go arrange a meeting to decide it then, because the last meeting where you decided that the old system couldn't be used but not what the new system will be clearly wasn't long enough. Maybe we can 'touch base' and 'work out the details' while I'm in the bog during the 20 seconds between the 10th and 11th meeting of the morning.

The only thing that gets me through the day is passing stupid notes about how bored I am like a 5 year old, I don't know what I would do if that pleasure was taken away from me :(.