"Have a good meeting." That's what Skype for Business says every time my heart sinks and I join a conference call that I know is largely irrelevant to me, in which I inevitably won't say anything whatsoever, and which causes my very soul to leak out of my ears a tiny little dribble at a time.
I hate meetings, whether they're in person or online. I don't like dealing with people. I especially don't really like listening to other people drone on about things I don't give a shit about. And my Tuesdays at the day job involve literally an entire morning of conference calls like this.
We open with the "Good Morning Call", which is over an hour of a bored-sounding Frenchman slowly going through our (awful) project management tool and reading everything out. And after that, we have individual business segment meetings, in which a bored-sounding Frenchman slowly goes through our (awful) project management tool and reads out the parts that are relevant to the business segment managers we have on the call. Then we have the meeting to update the regional representatives for whom we do stuff, in which a bored-sounding Frenchman slowly goes through the "Weekly Call" notes from our (awful) project management tool and whoever's name appears at the top of the slide has to read out what it says.
It's utterly soul-destroying, pointless and a complete waste of time, but there's a silver lining while we're all working from home: today I slept through this entire parade of bullshit. I set my alarm for five minutes before the start time of each one, joined the call, made sure I wasn't needed to talk about anything in particular (I never am, except in the last one) and then just napped through each of them, accompanied by my cats and a nice warm duvet. I then had a thoroughly productive afternoon, very much refreshed from the morning's activities.
I could get used to this working from home lark.
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