Meetings

Okay, I knew my new company had a "meeting culture" but today I had my first experience with what that meant.

I met with a project manager for the S*** project in the morning and we had a great discussion about what he was doing and how that related to what I was doing. He also explained who all the people on the very long email list were and where they sat in the meeting I went to which was very helpful. We then agreed that I would hold a kickoff meeting for my portion of the project. I felt like I was doing something!

Set up a meeting--easy. I opened Outlook and went to the calendar. Wait....there are a million rooms and I need a speakerphone and I know that most of the rooms don't have them. Which rooms have speaker phones? Are there preferred rooms? Cold rooms? Rooms with bad associations?

About then my manager stopped by to say Hi and ask how things were going. I told him what I had done so far that day and he said "Cool." He was about to leave when I asked him about meeting rooms. I told him that I knew there was a room in the basement set aside for the project. "Oh, don't use that room! Get **** to do it for you."

So I went over to the admin's cube area and she said she would be happy to help but I should figure out the time for the meeting first. I went to my cube and opened Outlook again, put in the dozen names for the meeting and saw that it was impossible to schedule a meeting anytime in the next month that would include all those people. I knew we had to have the meeting next week though so I went over to the project manager's cube and asked him who were the least necessary people on the list. His eyes widened and he said "They ALL have to come." So he opened Outlook, repeated what I did and saw the same thing. "During lunch on Tuesday we only miss one" he said. "In the future, for the recurring meeting, look a few weeks ahead and start there""

So I went back and set up the meeting, which a lot of people (who weren't in meetings) prompty accepted. Then I looked a few weeks ahead in the calendar and I still couldn't find a time. My coworker came by about then to introduce me to someone and I asked her how to work this. She looked at my list and told me that half those people weren't necessary and I was missing a bunch more necessary people. That meant I had to redo the one meeting I had successfully called and start over on the next meeting.

The most interesting things she told me was the everyone important to a project was double or triple booked all the time and they just decided at the time what meeting they would go to. That made me wonder if anyone ever accepted all the meetings and didn't go to any of them...nah, not at this place.

So it was five o'clock (late!) and I had to do this meeting stuff. I decided it could wait until tomorrow and left for another Widgets going away party.

A lot of folks were at a St. Paul bar to send off a designer who'd been in the company almost as long as I was. Only one programmer was there and he came in right when I was leaving so I didn't hear much except that his stress level was way up. I told him my stress level was way down. There must be some stress balancing force in the universe--maybe I could get a job studying that. Hmmm, might be stressful.