Meeting Hell

Unless you’re a filthy vagabond or the Vice President of the United States, you probably have a job, have had a job, or will be getting a job. This means that you (even if you’re the VP of US) will be stuck going to meetings. Maybe you’ll be lucky, and your job will be awesome and meetings few and far between. More likely, however, every stupid little thing that happens in and around the office will result in another long, boring, stab-your-eyes out meeting. So what will do you, while trapped in this office meeting of doom? Well, dear reader, I have survived through any number of meetings in my lifetime, and right here, today, I will share some of my tactics of survival with you.

Most people, when involved in a meeting for the first time, might think that it’s good to be clearly attentive to everything, and take lots of notes. These people are what we like to call “suck ups” in the parlance, and should be eliminated at all costs. No, my dear friends, brownosing is not a good idea, especially because your boss will expect you to do it every time, and that can get both tiring and messy. The closest I’d suggest to the rigorous note taking is what you already do in class – doodle. Stick figures fighting a dragon that’s perched on your company logo on the office stationary you have is, for instance, an excellent waste expenditure of time. Don’t zone out too much, though – you don’t want to miss anything in important (in the 1 in a million outside chance that something important is said). Just learn to listen for the speaker’s tone of voice and key phrases (such as your department name/your name), and you should be okay. This particular skill may take some time, so be sure to give it plenty of practice whenever you can (such as when you’re listening to your parents/significant other/kids talk about blatantly boring crap, like boy bands/boys/taxes/bills/the fact that you drink too much).

A favorite meeting pastime is, unsurprisingly, daydreaming. It’s fun, it’s simple, and you can do it all day long. Don’t want to be sitting in the beige, fluorescent-lit, fake-leather chair conference room? Just imagine that you’re on a folding lounge chair on a Mexican beach, your feet dangling off the end of it and resting in the sapphire water. Or maybe ninjas break in through the ceiling and start killing everybody, but you use your chair to fend them off and kill them, one by one, impressing the company CEO so much with your bravery and skill that he gives you the company as a gift of gratitude. Or perhaps air pirates launch a raid on your office, and you kill their captain and take over the ship, leading them on exciting and sexy adventures, most of which involve primarily naked and willing young (but perfectly legal) women. You get the drift. The most interesting of these daydreams can be the fantasizing, but proceed with caution. You need to first make sure you have someone cute in the meeting to fantasize about, or you run the risk of thinking of images that you didn’t want in the first place. Remember: whatever you imagine cannot be un-imagined. However, if that hot girl/guy in the short skirt/tight pants that you’ve had your eye on is there, then feel free to eye-hump to your heart’s content. Just try not to make it obvious. You think your mom walking in on you doing the One-Hand Fandango in your bedroom when you were 13 was embarrassing? Imagine if your boss caught you mentally performing 6 positions you had read about online once with Suzie from Accounting. Imagine if Suzie was your boss’s daughter/niece/wife.

At that point, you might as well just go out and buy the paper for the Classifieds (or, alternatively, go here).

So that’s doodling and fantasizing. “But Tom,” you ask, “I both have no skill in drawing and no imagination. Please, what can I do during my meetings?” Well, Whiny McBorington, you could: play Chinese football with Ted from Finance; use your laptop to read this website/the other sites in the Obscure, Inq family; use your laptop to instant message Suzie into getting her to undo more buttons on her conspicuously tight blouse; use your laptop as a projectile; play that game where you lay your hand palm-down on the table, spread your fingers, and stab the table with a pen really fast, moving back and forth between all your fingers, trying not to cut one off; unscrew key parts of your pen until it becomes an ink-and-plastic blowdart; stand up, declare yourself the King (or Queen) of Confrenconia, and declare your boss an enemy of the state; play musical chairs without telling anyone; use a long rope made of neckties knotted together to repel out the window, down the side of the building, and to freedom (note: requires planning ahead in the form of getting your hands on a ton of friggin neckties); play games on your cell phone; take pictures of people’s crotches with your cell phone; pretend you have an urgent call from your doctor/psychiatrist; pretend you have an urgent call from the President of the United States; assume everyone in the room with you is a zombie, and take necessary actions to ensure your continued survival; run around screaming in what can only be assumed is a foreign language; pretend to know ASL, and translate everything your boss says into your version of it for someone across the table from you; deftly cover the entire room in something hilariously inappropriate, such as Peeps, vibrators, or tin foil; set fire to everything.

Well, I hope that helps! I’ve attended all of 2 or 3 department meetings in the entire year I’ve been at my current job, so I’ve become adept at not even being around for them. But in the off chance I get tricked into showing up, you can be damn well sure that I will be doodling the continued adventures of Sticky McKilleverything. Do any of you have any fun tips or tricks you use to survive your incredibly boring and epic-less meetings? Let us know in the comments below!

You can’t spell “informational meeting” without ” A Faerie Molting,”

Tom