How to Attend a Meeting

by Dave Barry

To really succeed in a business or organization, it is
sometimes helpful to know what your job is, and whether it
involves any duties. Ask among your coworkers. "Hi," you
should say. "I'm a new employee. What is the name of my
job?" If they answer "long-range planner" or "lieutenant
governor," you are pretty much free to lounge around and do
crossword puzzles until retirement. Most jobs, however, will
require some work.

There are two major kinds of work in modern organizations:

1. Taking phone messages for people who are in meetings, and
2. Going to meetings.

Your ultimate career strategy will be to get a job involving
primarily No. 2, going to meetings, as soon as possible,
because that's where the real prestige is. It is all very
well and good to be able to take phone messages, but you are
never going to get a position of power, a position where you
can cost thousands of people their jobs with a single
bonehead decision, unless you learn how to attend meetings.

The first meeting ever was held back in the Mezzanine Era.
In those days, Man's job was to slay his prey and bring it
home for Woman, who had to figure out how to cook it. The
problem was, Man was slow and basically naked, whereas the
prey had warm fur and could run like an antelope. (In fact
it was an antelope, only nobody knew this).

At last someone said, "Maybe if we just sat down and did
some brainstorming, we could come up with a better way to
hunt our prey!" It went extremely well, plus it was much
warmer sitting in a circle, so they agreed to meet again the
next day, and the next.

But the women pointed out that, prey-wise, the men had not
produced anything, and the human race was pretty much
starving. The men agreed that was serious and said they
would put it right near the top of their "agenda." At this
point, the women, who were primitive but not stupid, started
eating plants, and thus modern agriculture was born. It
never would have happened without meetings.

The modern business meeting, however, might better be
compared with a funeral, in the sense that you have a
gathering of people who are wearing uncomfortable clothing
and would rather be somewhere else. The major difference is
that most funerals have a definite purpose. Also, nothing is
really ever buried in a meeting.

An idea may look dead, but it will always reappear at
another meeting later on. If you have ever seen the movie,
"Night of the Living Dead," you have a rough idea of how
modern meetings operate, with projects and proposals that
everyone thought were killed rising up constantly from their
graves to stagger back into meetings and eat the brains of
the living.

There are two major kinds of meetings:

1. Meetings that are held for basically the same reason that
Arbor Day is observed - namely, tradition. For example, a
lot of managerial people like to meet on Monday, because
it's Monday. You'll get used to it. You'd better, because
this kind accounts for 83% of all meetings (based on a study
in which I wrote down numbers until one of them looked about
right). This type of meeting operates the way "Show and
Tell" does in nursery school, with everyone getting to say
something, the difference being that in nursery school, the
kids actually have something to say.

When it's your turn, you should say that you're still
working on whatever it is you're supposed to be working on.
This may seem pretty dumb, since obviously you'd be working
on whatever you're supposed to be working on, and even if
you weren't, you'd claim you were, but that's the
traditional thing for everyone to say. It would be a lot
faster if the person running the meeting would just say,
"Everyone who is still working on what he or she is supposed
to be working on, raise your hand." You'd be out of there in
five minutes, even allowing for jokes. But this is not how
we do it in America. My guess is, it's how they do it in
Japan.

2. Meetings where there is some alleged purpose. These are
trickier, because what you do depends on what the purpose
is. Sometimes the purpose is harmless, like someone wants to
show slides of pie charts and give everyone a big, fat
report. All you have to do in this kind of meeting is sit
there and have elaborate fantasies, then take the report
back to your office and throw it away, unless, of course,
you're a vice president, in which case you write the name of
a subordinate in the upper right hand corner, followed by a
question mark, like this: "Norm?" Then you send it to Norm
and forget all about it (although it will plague Norm for
the rest of his career).

But sometimes you go to meetings where the purpose is to get
your "input" on something. This is very serious because what
it means is, they want to make sure that in case whatever it
is turns out to be stupid or fatal,you'll get some of the
blame, so you have to escape from the meeting before they
get around to asking you anything. One way is to set fire to
your tie.

Another is to have an accomplice interrupt the meeting and
announce that you have a phone call from someone very
important, such as the president of the company or the Pope.
It should be one or the other. It would a sound fishy if the
accomplice said, "You have a call from the president of the
company, or the Pope."

You should know how to take notes at a meeting. Use a yellow
legal pad. At the top, write the date and underline it
twice. Now wait until an important person, such as your
boss, starts talking; when he does, look at him with an
expression of enraptured interest, as though he is revealing
the secrets of life itself. Then write interlocking
rectangles like this: (picture of doodled rectangles).

If it is an especially lengthy meeting, you can try
something like this (Picture of more elaborate doodles and a
caricature of the boss).

If somebody falls asleep in a meeting, have everyone else
leave the room. Then collect a group of total strangers,
right off the street, and have them sit around the sleeping
person until he wakes up. Then have one of them say to him,
"Bob, your plan is very, very risky. However, you've given
us no choice but to try it. I only hope, for your sake, that
you know what you're getting yourself into." Then they
should file quietly out of the room.