Meetings

When I was younger, it was hard to relate to some of the things my parents said. A particular thing that was hard to believe was how terrible meetings were for my father. That may sound incredible, but I had a hard time believing that meetings would be as consistently unpleasant and useless as he often made them out to me. A day spent in meetings was a day wasted, as he would tell it. They were just objectively bad things.

Somehow I had a hard time believing that. I could imagine the meetings not being fun. After all, they were a workplace duty, and I understood that work was something that was often not fun. If the meeting was part of something recreational, then surely it held the potential of being fun. You could have a meeting to decide what ice cream flavors to stock the home refrigerator with, for example. That's a bad example.

I couldn't understand how meetings would be unproductive. How could professionals operating a successful business regularly engage in unproductive practices like meetings where nothing useful happens? Everyone is given to make the occasional mistake, so a bad meeting could happen once, but why would you do it over and over again when everyone agrees that they don't result in anything good?

Being an adult myself now, I sometimes find myself in meetings, and it's just like my father said. They are almost never productive. I was recently in a meeting whose entire purpose was to relate the making of a decision which it was too late to do anything about except impotently express dissatisfaction (or, of course, satisfaction). It might as well have just been an email, and promised refreshments did not happen at all. It was a bad meeting.