Meetings eat my soul

Today started out usual, with the normal Thursday conference call scheduled for 9AM. The conference call, besides giving me something concrete to do for about 1.5 hours a week, is always amusing. The Germans call in with their adorable, stereotypical German accents and I snicker. The Quebecois call in, with slightly less than perfect English because they just can't be bothered to thoroughly learn a language which is not French and I snicker. The Mexicans call in, always a little late and two weeks behind on the project and I snicker. The foreign offices make the phone call a chaotic mix of trying to explain things in 8 different ways in 4 different languages. The whole thing makes me smile.

As such, I usually walk into the conference room in a fairly good mood, well prepared to take notes and scrounge up any data needed for the conversation. Little did I expect to leave the conference room more than 7 hours later a little less happy and completely drained. The conference call, was, as expected, and amusing display of multiculturalism that ended with us setting a deadline for some dreaded documents. My plant had been working on these documents for the last couple weeks for an hour a day. When my boss came back from vacation on Monday, he promptly declared all our work was, well, wrong. As a result, once he had us in the conference room for the phone call, he could easily keep us all captive there.

At 4:15 I started to get antsy, so much so that by 4:30 we were released with orders to appear again tomorrow at 8AM sharp. I will be coming well equipped with caffeine this time. The confusing part of the whole experience is how it could possibly tire me so much. I spend most days traipsing up and down the stairs to my office, busily running sparking tests, moving specimen, and making samples. A day where I spend more than half at my desk, or even sitting is unusual. I spent the majority of today sitting, but left more tired than 90% of my days. Strange. Now that I've thought about it, there are several things which probably brought me (and the others) down.

1. Sitting in a dark room staring at a screen is not active. It's hard to keep your mind on something, when you only occasionally need to make comments and aren't actually doing anything yourself.
2. Further, you're just straining your eyes to see the screen, making them want to close just to make the pain stop and closed eyes are mentally associated with sleep.
3. Starting over (again) did nothing for morale. We already did all this, twice actually. Telling us we're wrong and have to do it over again is not going to make us happy.
4. Useless people just serve to suck off some of the communal energy without giving much back. For the first part of the meeting, I understood what was going on and had useful things to say. For the second part, there was little I was able to contribute, so my presence just consumed positive energy.
5. Planning was obviously not undertaken. The way the session was run was inefficient, not to mention that springing it on us did not give anyone time to prepare mentally or otherwise.

Overall, it wasn't the best working-meeting I've ever been in. In the future, if I ever run something similar, I will try to change things, like using physical paper charts and markers rather than one person controlling a computer screen, writing agendas mailed in advance, making sure that everyone who needs to be there is, and doesn't isn't, and copious use of natural lighting.

I think I need a nap now.