Ostomy Memories of Meetings

THE BEST WAY TO LOOK LIKE YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING without actually doing anything is to call a meeting.  Bring a committee together and you create the appearance of seeking to accomplish something.  Committees are made up of people with various goals and opinions and thus have a way of spawning sub-committees.  If the general subject at hand is at all complicated or involved, research may be necessary, experts may have to be called in, reports assigned and generated and printed and dispersed.  More meetings, of course, will become essential.  All the committee members will have different schedules, naturally, and so it will take time to get the appointed members together for interim meetings and substantive discussions of the material.  It may have taken Shakespeare three months to write ‘Macbeth,’ but it will take over a year for the committee in question to arrive at a point where any action can even be contemplated, let alone performed.  By then, circumstances will have changed sufficiently to have to re-commence the entire process.  In this manner, you accomplish what you wish to accomplish, which is nothing at all.  

Meetings... one of the many things I do not miss from walking away from the 'rat race'.

Henry, are you secretly writing about the railroad? First graffiti and now meetings that are pointless..... Railroad 100.

Hello HenryM.

Your observations about ‘meetings’ resonate so clearly with me as representing what they tend to do and achieve.

I managed to avoid attending all the so-called ‘essential’ meetings where I worked for almost 40 years. What I found was that those who attended regularly were reprimanded when they opted out, whereas people like me were not even missed because we never attended at all.

The above statement isn’t entirely accurate,  because I did attend a few meetings when I first joined the organisation. However, it quickly became clear that they were a complete waste of my time and appeared to be a manipulative device/charade to fool people into believing that the management knew what they were doing.  Indeed, meetings reminded me of politicians, who want people to listen and believe ‘their’ point of view, but are almost deaf and unwilling to listen to anyone else’s perspectives.

At the end of each meeting ‘someone’ would produce some written ‘minutes’ – which often bore little or no resemblance to what was actually discussed , but was remarkably accurate in representing what the management wanted people to believe had occurred at the meeting.

The minutes are then used as ‘evidential-truth’ of what was discussed and decided in much the same way as certain  politicians tend to lie to us on daily basis about almost anything and everything, and then quote what they said previously as ‘the truth’.

Needless to say, I felt the need to document this manipulative process in rhyme at the time to remind me why I was opting out of that particular ‘GAME’.

Best wishes

Bill

I WILL TAKE THE MINUTES.

Minute-taking’s an arduous task

when people will argue or gabble too fast.

But when all that talking  is long-since gone,

only the minutes will linger on.

Minutes will rarely raise a fuss

accepted by the rest of us.

What’s it matter what was said 

- what remains is what is read.

Let ‘ME’ take the  minutes now,

so I can deftly show you how

to slightly slant the things they say 

to record this meeting MY OWN WAY!

                                                    B. Withers 1990

                                              (in: Evidence 1992)

Ahhh yes, we meeting goers called this the "meeting of the behinds" ah. Er.....minds. Then, I think it was IBM that came up with the brilliant idea of a "no chairs meeting" (everyone was to stand during the meeting) which was supposed to hurry ideas along ....those were the days my friend

Well, I once was told that I had B & O... 

I am thinking that was a typo and that you were actually holding a meeting and the meeting goers said you could move on - possibly to Baltimore, Ohio or maybe both by train!

I used to sit in the back row of the meeting. I had someone tell me I was the only person they knew who could doze off and not let my head drop. LOL