All meetinged out, no place to go.

When it comes to working, there are plenty of things I absolutely DO NOT MISS. High on the list are politicking, managing, and commuting. But a tweet that flew across my timeline the other day reminded me that meetings are right up there, too.

Here's the tweet, from "@Katiohead" - someone I don't follow and who I don't remember crossing virtual paths with before - which made me, if not laugh out loud, then at least chortle silently:

Three stages of career development are: I want to be in the meeting, I want to run the meeting, I want to avoid meetings.

Yep, I remember when I actually wanted to be included in meetings, where sometimes I felt like the Poor Little Match Girl. There I was shivering, nose pressed up against the window, lighting my rapidly dwindling store of matches, hoping someone would notice me and let me in. 

Meetings were where the big dogs hung out, where the best info flowed, where the decisions (bad as they were) were made. Second prize was that, as often as not, I was tight enough with my boss to find out all the good stuff after the fact. But mostly I wanted in.

Sometimes it was just galling, as when I prepped my boss for a meeting with the bigs at corporate - we were in the goofy Cambridge outpost. I pulled everything together and packaged it up in a set of spiffy "foils" - transparencies that were used with overhead projectors back in the pre-PC/pre-Powerpoint days - and even prepped a script for my boss.

I had made my case for attending the meeting, but it was a no go.

Then, what to my wondering eyes did appear, but one of my peers heading out the door with my boss to schlepp out to Waltham for the big meet up. Somehow this ahole had weaseled his way into the meeting. And he had the nerve to come into my office to thank me for all the prep work I'd done. Grrrrrr.

And then, fast forward only a bit, and I was both invited to more meetings, and, day-um, running a lot of meetings of my own. 

I was suddenly in charge of products and projects that mattered. I was the one running not all the meetings, but plenty of them. I was the one rallying at least some of the troops, the one giving the shout outs, not getting them. As I explained once to my boss, who had told me that he was going to give me credit for something or other at a company all hands, I'd rather be the one giving the praise than getting it. Even though I was never power-mad, I knew where the power was. And I wanted at least a modest little piece of the modest power one might hold at a small goofy company. 

And then...

I joined a large company. A company that was colossally meeting happy.

Some days, I found myself in back-to-backs from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

It was like being in an extended version of high school, without the bells to remind us to pick up our books and move on to the next class. 

Somehow, you had to wedge in an occasional free period to get some work done.

Earlier in my career, I'd spent a few years in another large company. There were plenty of meetings, but nothing like this. (The culture there was more "copy everyone on everything." When I first got there, I was given the list of people who needed to be copied on every memo I wrote concerning the product I was managing. As I pointed out to my manager, there were more cc's on the list than there were clients or my product. Hmmmm.)

Back at the meeting happy company, a treacherous aspect of the culture was that there was food served at many of the meetings.

A 7:30 a.m. meeting guaranteed you a complete breakfast. A 9 a.m. meeting meant muffins or bagels. Lunch meetings were very popular, with a full spread (sandwiches, chips, cookies). Afternoon meetings meant cookies, sodas, and candy bars. I remember one mid-afternoon meeting where there were two platters of petit-fours, dozens of candy bars, and a wide selection of waters and sodas. The spread was enough to cater a small wedding. (The admins ordered the food, and knew that everything that was leftover was set out for anyone to grab and go. So they generally ordered excess so that there would be lots of grub to go around. This went on for a couple of years until a new president blew in and put an end to it.)

I think I gained 10 pounds the first few months I was there before I realized that I'd have to mitigate things by avoiding the elevators and walking between floors. 

I had joined Meetings, Inc. as an individual contributor, but pretty quickly found myself accumulating a team. I had experience managing small groups - 3 or 4 directs, no layers - but here I was with a couple of dozen reports and an intervening layer between me and them. 

The best thing about it? I could dispatch one of my directs, or they could dispatch one of their directs, to attend some of these meetings. 

Not that I wanted to waste anyone's time, but I just couldn't take the 12 hour non-stop meetings where there was often no reason for me to be there other than to hear stuff and/or answer an occasional question. 

I made it easier for folks not to resent going to meetings because I tried to make sure that, wherever possible, they would have an opportunity to make a presentation and/or get some exposure to senior managers. So it wasn't all about their being stuck at the really low-end meetings. 

(I wasn't all that noble. If the meeting was a one-on-one with the company president to brief him on overall product positioning, that was a me meeting.)

I also became more careful about what invites to accept, for me or anyone in my crew. Some meetings, I just refused to deputize anyone to attend in my place. Meeting organizers sometimes got pissed, but the meeting thang was really out of hand.

After that gig ended - I volunteered for separation - I had one more corporate stint in me. We had a fair number of meetings there, but the company was an agglomeration of a bunch of small internet services companies scattered all around the country. This was before Zoom and Webex were around - there were remote video systems but they were expensive and not very good: lots of latency and jittering - so meetings were conducted via phone bridges. So you could sit at your desk and parallel process: getting some work done and/or instant messaging with your friends.  

Ah, meetings...

Not something I miss about not working. 

@Katiohead definitely has it right.