Meting Minutes

Everybody supposedly loves a parade. Which I dispute. If so, though, everybody must hate a meeting. Which I further dispute, having met a few of the rare subset of homo sapiens who seem to revel in meetings (people I generically and collectively refer to as Ron). While not complete torturous hell, meetings are pretty bad, and if I had to guess, I'd say Purgatory is like one long meeting, minus the snacks. Needless to say, the absolute worst thing to be at a meeting isn't late, but the one who has to "take the minutes." While everyone at the meeting, except of course Ron, has minutes which turn to hours taken from their lives, the minute taker--unlike everyone else present--actually has to pay attention to the proceedings. It's no wonder that at certain particularly frazzled times of my time I've shown up at meetings with my hands crudely bandaged ("Ah, nothing too serious; you know me and my ineptness with that blasted can opener in the staff kitchenette!"), making it all but certain no one looks at me when the inevitable "So who wants to take the minutes?" question/plea is raised (admittedly a kind of wimpy, desperate ploy on my part, but at least a little more dignified than a guy I used to work with, Earl, who, when called upon to take the minutes always replied, "No can do, Ron, sorry. Bad case of the trots today"). Before I learned such an efficacious minutes-avoiding strategy, though, I got stuck taking minutes a few times. I'd rather watch a soundless video of Al Gore watching Bob Dole's paint dry. Anyway, I am qualified, then, to write the following, a distillation of the minutes of the more than twenty-five years of staff meetings I have endured. Purgatory on Earth.

4:00-4:03: Boisterous chit-chat, snack hoarding, and once again Steve Frugal's feeble joke about somebody getting on a chair and moving the clock ahead 20 minutes before Ron gets here. As usual, Suzie Inkling giggles.

4:03: Herb Tankerous walks past me with fresh cigarette ashes splattered down his barrel chest and mutters, "Bastard's late again, I see."

4:04: Barb Toole announces there's only two more days to order Girl Scout cookies from her.

4:05: IT Czar Brandt Watt erases the dry erase board and fiddles on a laptop. A transcript of what he's always talking to himself about would read like Finnegans Wake without the cohesiveness. To my right, LaVerne Hobble writes at the top of a blank piece of paper the phrase from which she will spend the entire meeting attempting to find all the various words that can be made from its letters: Highball Equals Oasis.

4:06: Ron arrives laden with manila folders and his ever-present coffee mug that reads, Hers. Pointing toward the laptop, he whispers something to Brandt Watt, who gives him a thumbs up. LaVerne writes labial.

4:07-4:10: Ron makes the usual jokes about being late, the usual comments about the tight agenda, and the usual promise to have us all out by 5. LaVerne writes squish.

4:11: After the mandatory three seconds of everyone's eye-averting silence, Barb Toole chirps, "I'll take the minutes," and cheerfully digs a yellow legal pad from her ample carry-all and fishes a pen from behind her ear. The palpable tension in the air becomes slightly less palpable. LaVerne writes slough.

4:12-4:17: Ron takes it from 0 to 60 in no time. Something about "measured unknowns," "counter-intuitive cognition," and "fingers in the proverbial dike." The bootie Suzie Inkling is knitting is pink. I give Herb Tankerous's eyelids another ninety seconds, tops. Brandt Watt's got a hole in his left sock, about an inch above the ankle. Who gets sock holes there?

4:18: Barb Toole politely interrupts Ron, while never stopping the pen's flow, to ask, "Was that 'convex paradigms' or 'concave'?" Ron says, "You know," and makes a swooping gesture with his hands. "Oh, gotcha," Barb replies.

4:19: Earl Frank trots out the door.

4:20: Jeff Gage gets twitchy.

4:21: Without lifting her eyes from Highball Equals Oasis, LaVerne asks, "Will there be an extra stipend for that?" Ron, a tad flustered, says, "I'll check with Alex about that. No promises, though." LaVerne writes quash.

4:22: "differentiated verisimilitudes"

4:23: I lift the bag of Sun Chips to my mouth and shake out the last few shards.

4:24: Barb flips a page and keeps on writing. "maximal diversity of output ranges"

4:25: "Good point, Hal." Hal? Who's Hal? Oh, the new guy with the rash. "Make sure you cc Dan with that to keep him in the loop." No need, Ron. Permanently looped, right here.

4:26: LaVerne writes ibis.

4:27: Earl ambles back in. How he manages to open and close that door without a squeak is beyond me.

4:28-4:47: I have no idea.

4:48: How come the second hand (a jolter, not a sweeper) on that clock never lines up directly with the minute slashes?

4:49: Projected from the laptop, all that shows on the dry erase board is an error message I can't make out from here. Must get eyes checked soon.

4:50: The bootie is now blue.

4:51: LaVerne's been tapping her pen on the page for a while now. I lean over and whisper, "quail." "Mind your own damn business," Verne whispers back with affection.

4:52: Ron apologizes for the technical difficulties then refers us to the handout, which contains the whole PowerPoint presentation anyway. Brandt Watt, sounding like a bi-lingual Tourette's sufferer, mutters willy-nilly while pressing a bunch of keys on the laptop.

4:53-4:55: In what appears to my ears like one long sentence, Rich Wallow, incorporating "throw the baby out with the bathwater," "ostentatiously flouting Robert's Rules of Order," "simply in-box thinking," "lopping off our noses to spite our faces," "mired in bogosity," and "two-bit snake oil," raises his usual objections.

4:56: Ron duly takes Rich's input into due consideration.

4:57: Suzie Inkling pulls another ball of yarn from an oversized bag. If that stuff were oil, she'd be a sheik.

4:58: LaVerne crumples up the Highball Equals Oasis paper and whispers to no one in particular, "I gotta pee. Let's draw the curtain on this charade."

4:59: Barb drops her pen for a second, massages her right wrist for a few seconds, then gets back to writing.

5:00: "Anyone interested in serving on the committee to set parameter paradigms for the formation of future committees, see me now."

5:01: As we get into our separate cars out in the parking lot, Earl Frank says, "That wasn't too bad, as far as meetings go, no?"