Rave: Having an iPad during an awful meeting

[greenback44]

There's a 1% chance that something here could be important, and I can't really miss that 1%. But this is just a hideously bad meeting. Basically it's a 1.5 hour Q&A session, where only a small portion of the attendees are affected by each question.

At least I can go read various smackdowns of the hedge fun clown who tweeted misinformation about Hurricane Sandy.

[jim]

I have two weekly meetings that are exactly like that.

[slide_into_first]

I know about hedge fun.

[greenback44]

I have two weekly meetings that are exactly like that.

Based on my experience today and my understanding of your job (IT of some sort) I guess that doesn't surprise me. Apparently today's meeting was about data handoffs from A to B to C... to Z. And it got messy for everyone between K and W.

I hope you have a really nice phone or a really nice tablet.

[Radbird]

For most of my conference calls, I'm on mute and spending some quality time with you guys.

[slide_into_first]

What is heart warming is, greenback is a stat type baseball fan, jim is a scout type, Rad is more of a common sense-casual fan, and you all share a common bond.

[lukethedrifter]

we need to have more meetings. how is that for crazy?

[jim]

I have two weekly meetings that are exactly like that.

Based on my experience today and my understanding of your job (IT of some sort) I guess that doesn't surprise me. Apparently today's meeting was about data handoffs from A to B to C... to Z. And it got messy for everyone between K and W.

I hope you have a really nice phone or a really nice tablet.

The two meetings like that every week are the Monday afternoon operations meeting. I present my departments issues for the past week to the CIO, along with about 20 other departments. Normally it's one slide, highlighting the changes that were implemented and then at the lower half a summary of any outages. Total time to give: 1-5 minutes, 1 being more common than 5. I have to sit through 20 other departments on the 1:100 chance that whatever they had come up had some impact on me or vice versa. The meeting typically takes about 75 minutes, so you do the math on how much I am involved with it.

The other meeting is the same type of deal, except it's all of the project managers giving status to the CIO. This is worse, because I'm not a PM and don't even give a presentation. I just sit, because I have people that report to me that work on these projects, and there is a 1:100 chance that something might come up that I give a [expletive] about. It also runs about 75 minutes, up to 90.

I take my laptop and use the time to read technical articles. Self improvement time.

[jim]

This is my meeting schedule every week:

Monday:
Monday morning is busy work - timecards, reading status reports, and then summarizing everything into one slide to present to the CIO. Alot of times I do this Sunday night at home

12:45-2:00 - Weekly operations meeting to CIO
2:00-2:30 - Weekly status for project A with a group of 3 developers.
2:30-3:00 - Weekly status for system B with the primary admin.
3:00-4:30 - Weekly status with Division head.

Tuesday:
9:30-10:00 - Weekly status for project C with one developer.
10:30-11:00 - Weekly status for project D with one developer.
12:45-2:00 - Weekly project meeting to CIO
2:00 - 3:00 - Weekly meeting for project E

Wednesday:
9:00 - 10:00 - Change Advisory Board meeting - I can skip this if I don't have any major changes going in.
10:00 - 11:00 - Steering committe meeting for system blah
2:30 - 3:30 - Group meeting. I cancel this about 1/2 the time. Today I have one.

Thursday:
2:30 - 3:00 - Weekly status for project blah

Friday:
09:00 - 10:00 - Weekly group leaders meeting

..

You can tell I don't really do any work - especially early in the week. Thursday and Friday are pretty light, but Mon-Wed suck.

[Radbird]

What is heart warming is, greenback is a stat type baseball fan, jim is a scout type, Rad is more of a common sense-casual fan, and you all share a common bond.

Common sense? Of course, I agree with that. Everything I say or post makes perfect sense to me.

Casual fan? Mrs. Rad would disagree. She often reminds me that "fan" is short for "fanatic". Casual in the sense that I'm not a saber-geek? I would have to plead guilty to that. I'm more of a traditional stat guy and supplement that with game observations. I enjoy reading the stat related discussions and take from them what I can. In most cases, they don't change my view of things but reinforce them. That said, becoming a stathead would be a great way to divert myself while I listen to these corporate wonks drone on and on and on....(I'm on a call right now, can't you tell?)