I have just had the World’s Most Pointless Meeting. And believe me, around here the competition for that particular accolade is pretty stiff.
When the Obviously Pointless Meeting was called this morning, I wanted to reply to the email with:
‘No need to meet. I have already resolved the minor query that I can tell you are just dying to build into a drama of Titanic proportions. It took 2 minutes’ thought and one short phone call last night. So, thanks very much but I don’t need your advice on ‘the issue’, nor do I need to sit for 20 minutes while you shuffle papers and restate what you – in your headless-chicken-with-a-clipboard response – think is a huge disaster, just so you can have a thinly veiled dig at two of my colleagues as though it was their fault. I say again, we do not need a meeting. Please. Stop. Calling. Meetings.’
But I didn’t. Instead I went to the meeting and did my best to remain calm, even though I had to repeat the fact that there was no longer anything to deal with about 4 times before it penetrated her determined effort to lay out all the reasons why it would be such an enormous problem that we should all PANIC.
And people think I have control issues. Good lord, if one of my team resolves something, I’m delighted – I don’t need or want to know how they did it, as long as its done. I only need to know about it if they can’t resolve it and need to escalate it up to me to handle and even then, we don’t need to call a meeting to discuss it. But this woman is the very type species of micro-manager (not my manager, thank the gods for small mercies) and she is also a completely inflexible worrier.
peripatetic sloth 
When you get together with your sweetie, avoid having meetings. Though at some point Differences Will Arise. Have a good mediator on call, or at least a giant prehistoric wombat that will sit on both of you until you say “uncle.” Or “auntie.” Or whatever you say in the Commonwealth.
Apparently this either something to do with parrots (a vicious neighbor’s parrot once growled at me) or with beggars and gentlemen, something as an American barbarian I know nothing about.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-say1.htm
My sweetie is a professional facilitator, and is also (luckily) used to dealing with us generally uncooperative creatives so we probably won’t need the giant prehistoric wombat… though I suspect we’d both like one anyway.
We don’t have the expression ‘to say uncle’ in the UK, and I don’t remember it from my childhood in Ireland either, so I suspect it is a purely Uncle Sam type idiom 🙂
Good grief. Maybe you should have sent the email! The problem with calling meetings like this is after a while if you do it often enough, if you have an actual emergency no one will take it seriously.
Say, have a really wonderful time in the UK…
Time to get off all this piffling minutiae and get down to some good, old fashioned lovin’. I bet you cannot WAIT! DYING to hear all the details, fly safely and leave all this workaday bullshit BEEE-hind xxxxxx
Yep, Piereth has nailed it.