Meetings, Meetings, Meetings

Lots of meetings at work today.  There was a meeting that we were asked to attend in person, but which I decided to take from my desk.  Why?  Because it was an hour and a half and I didn’t want to be stuck in a room with other people pretending not to be bored out of mind.  Instead, at my desk, I can spend my time more constructively e.g. by composing this blog entry, and playing Candy Crush (which I think, sadly, I’ve grown something of an addiction to), whilst listening to the presentations on my headset and occasionally checking out the slides.  I can think of lots more reasons not to attend – the meeting room chairs are notoriously bad and if I’m stuck in one of those for 1.5 hours then I am guaranteed to get a bad back.  And also, we have had more than one e-mail concerning meeting etiquette where we are told not to bring our laptops to meetings like these – so you don’t even have the distraction of that.  Since it is a video conference, everyone in the Seattle office can apparently be seen on a huge screen in the Californian meeting room where the bulk of the meeting attendees are.  So you can’t even doodle, roll your eyes or anything obvious during the meeting because everyone can see you.  Because we are a satellite office in Seattle, we are frequently affected by audio or visual problems at these big meetings since they don’t realize in California that there are issues for the people calling in to the meeting.  Take today’s meeting where they didn’t share the screen until well into the first presentation, so we couldn’t see any of the presentation slides to begin with.  But there are some perks to all these meetings.  At lunchtime we had a Seattle site meeting, which means lunch is provided.  Bonus!  And when these site meetings happen, often because someone in a significant leadership role happens to be visiting our office, they are normally good to provide a lot of info that we (and a lot of the other muggles across our company) wouldn’t otherwise know about concerning company developments.  Regardless, it seems inevitable that the bigger a company gets, the more meetings there are, and the more of your time is wasted.  One of the reasons I don’t like my current manager is because she has set up so many recurring meetings at the study level, on top of all these departmental and company meetings.  I consider most of these as totally unnecessary, but symptomatic of her overly controlling nature.  And it all means that you end up having so much less time during a normal week to actually do proper work.  However, there might be good news on the job front.  Nothing confirmed yet, but it seems more likely than not now that I will be changing groups and manager soon.  Hoorah!