You're kidding that you don't know who Dave Berry is! Aren't you?
Posted on 04/22/2002 8:37:03 AM PDT by FairWitness
Edited on 05/11/2004 10:57:57 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
It's another Monday, and if you're lucky enough to have a job, how hard are you going to work today? Probably not very.
I'm thinking about the concept called "undertime." It's the opposite of "overtime." While O.T. refers to the time you put in after your standard eight hours, U.T. is the amount of time you don't really work during your standard eight hours. For instance, I put in a lot of U.T. Maybe I sit at my computer and read the sports wire for a while. Then I might wander over to a friend's desk and chat for a while. Sometimes I walk down to the river.
(Excerpt) Read more at home.post-dispatch.com ...
I agree. Don't forget that the opposite is also true - one man's decision in one second can also be the ruination of another person's lifetime of work.
I had a boss that always told us, "I don't care what you do. Just make it happen."
How to Attend a Meeting
by Dave Barry
To really succeed in a business or organization, it is sometimes helpful to know what your job is, and whether it involves any duties. Ask among your coworkers. “Hi,” you should say. “I’m a new employee. What is the name of my job?”If they answer “long-range planner” or “lieutenant governor,” you are pretty much free to lounge around and do crossword puzzles until retirement. Most jobs, however, will require some work.
There are two major kinds of work in modern organizations:Your ultimate career strategy will be to get a job involving primarily No.2, going to meetings, as soon as possible, because that’s where the real prestige is. It is all very well and good to be able to take phone messages, but you are never going to get a position of power, a position where you can cost thousands of people their jobs with a single bonehead decision, unless you learn how to attend meetings.1. Taking phone messages for people who are in meetings, and,
2. Going to meetings.
The first meeting ever was held back in the Mezzanine Era. In those days, Man’s job was to slay his prey and bring it home for Woman, who had to figure out how to cook it. The problem was, Man was slow and basically naked, whereas the prey had warm fur and could run like an antelope. (In fact it *was* an antelope, only nobody knew this). At last someone said, “Maybe if we just sat down and did some brainstorming, we could come up with a better way to hunt our prey!” It went extremely well, plus it was much warmer sitting in a circle, so they agreed to meet again the next day, and the next. But the women pointed out that, prey-wise, the men had not produced anything, and the human race was pretty much starving. The men agreed that was serious and said they would put it right near the top of their “agenda”. At this point, the women, who were primitive but not stupid, started eating plants, and thus modern agriculture was born. It never would have happened without meetings.
The modern business meeting, however, might better be compared with a funeral, in the sense that you have a gathering of people who are wearing uncomfortable clothing and would rather be somewhere else. The major difference is that most funerals have a definite purpose. Also, nothing is really ever buried in a meeting. An idea may look dead, but it will always reappear at another meeting later on. If you have ever seen the movie, “Night of the Living Dead,” you have a rough idea of how modern meetings operate, with projects and proposals that everyone thought were killed rising up constantly from their graves to stagger back into meetings and eat the brains of the living.
There are two major kinds of meetings:But sometimes you go to meetings where the purpose is to get your “input” on something. This is very serious because what it means is, they want to make sure that in case whatever it is turns out to be stupid or fatal, you’ll get some of the blame, so you have to escape from the meeting before they get around to asking you anything. One way is to set fire to your tie. Another is to have an accomplice interrupt the meeting and announce that you have a phone call from someone very important such as the president of the company or the Pope. It should be one or the other. It would a sound fishy if the accomplice said, “You have a call from the president of the company, or the Pope.” You should know how to take notes at a meeting. Use a yellow legal pad. At the top, write the date and underline it twice. Now wait until an important person, such as your boss, starts talking; when he does, look at him with an expression of enraptured interest, as though he is revealing the secrets of life itself. Then write interlocking rectangles like this:1. Meetings that are held for basically the same reason that Arbor Day is observed -namely, tradition. For example, a lot of managerial people like to meet on Monday, because it’s Monday. You’ll get used to it. You’d better, because this kind account for 83% of all meetings (based on a study in which I wrote down numbers until one of them looked about right). This type of meeting operates theway “Show and Tell” does in nursery school, with everyone getting to say something, the difference being that in nursery school, the kids actually have something to say. When it’s your turn, you should say that you’re still working on whatever it is you’re supposed to be working on. This may seem pretty dumb, since obviously you’d be working on whatever you’re supposed to be working on, and even if you weren’t, you’d claim you were, but that’s the traditional thing for everyone to say. It would be a lot faster if the person running the meeting would just say, “Everyone who is still working on what he or she is supposed to be working on, raise your hand.” You’d be out of there in five minutes, even allowing for jokes. But this is not how we do it in America. My guess is, it’s how they do it in Japan.
2. Meetings where there is some alleged purpose. These are trickier, because what you do depends on what the purpose is. Sometimes the purpose is harmless, like someone wants to show slides of pie charts and give everyone a big, fat report. All you have to do in this kind of meeting is sit there and have elaborate fantasies, then take the report back to your office and throw it away, unless, of course, you’re a vice president, in which case you write the name of a subordinate in the upper right hand corner, followed be a question mark, like this: “Norm?” Then you send it to Norm and forget all about it (although it will plague Norm for the rest of his career).
(picture of doodled rectangles)
If it is an especially lengthy meeting, you can try something like this
(Picture of more elaborate doodles and a caricature of the boss)
If somebody falls asleep in a meeting, have everyone else leave the room. Then collect a group of total strangers, right off the street, and have them sit around the sleeping person until he wakes up. Then have one of them say to him, “Bob, your plan is very, very risky. However, you’ve given us no choice but to try it. I only hope, for your sake, that you know what you’re getting yourself into.” Then they should file quietly out of the room.
You're kidding that you don't know who Dave Berry is! Aren't you?
I can vouch for the fact that ideas, especially the bad ones, never really die.
Shucks, you got me there... For any other poor soul who doesn't know who Dave Barry is, check out this website: The automated Dave Barry column generator.
No, they don't. They merely wait for the person who last slew them to not show up at the next meeting. In corporate America, there are a number of reasons for attending any meeting:
1. To show that you are still there. Show up first and wear the darkest suit in the room. This gives you the most power;
2. To kill off any resurrections of ideas you killed off at the last meeting;
3. To move deadlines up. 95% of the work on all projects is done in the last 24 hours before deadlines. If you want it done, insist that it be done in 24 hours;
4. By showing up first, you can be the first to leave; your veto power will stay there, however;
5. To get an entire days work done in the hour that everyone ELSE is in the meeting. You may then leave for the day. This is one of the BEST uses for a meeting I've ever seen.
Remember that "Meetings are events at which the MINUTES are kept and the HOURS ARE LOST." Use this to your advantage.
Michael
No flames, please. like how do I know. I start my work-at-home day at 8 am and go to the MSN game zone for a quick stress break.
He hired an efficiency expert to review his entire operation. Several weeks passed, and the man made his report. "On the whole, you have a very efficient organization. However, I do have a few recommendations."
"Fine. Let me have 'em."
"Well, for starters, there's this fellow down the hall. Every time I pass his office, I see him with his feet up on his desk, his head back. He appears to be sleeping. So I recommend you dismiss that man immediately."
"Well, ordinarily, I'd agree with you. But, as I recall, the last time that fellow had an idea that saved me $100 million, he was in exactly the same position."
--Boris
Seems to be an offshoot of "The Peter Principle" whereby managers rise to the level of their own incompetence.
It's been my observation that such morons usually target talented underlings for downsizing under some incredible theory that having an incompetent staff will make themselves appear even more intelligent.
It truly is a bizarre phenomena!
If you have a really big problem to work on the first thing you should do is go play pool, get some target practice in, flirt with that coworker, hang around with the kids, sleep on it or whatever. Let your subconsious process the data for a while.
However that accounts for something like 1% of undertime (mostly by a few people). The rest is just gold bricking. All new projects should be ignored for at least 2 weeks, they will most likely get canceled anyhow.
No, seriously, thank you. :-)
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