Meetings, Meetings and more Meetings

In the past 2 days I've had 3 meetings totaling 4 hours. That's 4 work hours lost out of 16 possible. And I'll have at least 2 more meetings this week.

On Monday I had a One Hour meeting to plan what would be talked about on a One Hour meeting on Tuesday.

Tuesday I had a meeting from 1-3pm and one from 3-4pm. The first meeting ran over until 3:25. So for 25 minutes I had my cell phone to one ear and my land-line phone to the other ear. Having a wife and 11 kids, I'm well trained to carry on more than one conversation at a time. I wonder if I can get time and a half for those 25 minutes.

The only positive thing about the Tuesday meetings is that I work from home that day and I can sit around in my gym shorts on my living room floor with the phone on mute. I stretched, ate lunch, stuck my tongue out at the phone, surfed the web on my laptop and once in awhile chipped in a few words of wisdom for the meeting.

And I have at least 2 more meetings this week. Someone just shoot me. It's the same every week.

All of my meetings are tele-conferences. This software project I'm working on includes people from at least 10 states. Which is part of the problem. With everyone scattered around the country we do need to have a meeting every now and again. But we don't need 5 each week.

People just love to hear themselves talk (or blog ;)). These meetings seem to cover the same topics over and over (kinda like this blog) without ever deciding on anything. The main problem is a weak manager(s) on this project. But in a way it's a good thing. This project was scheduled to release the software on October 31st and then there would be 3 months of wrap up. After December 31st my bosses would then have had to find me another project to work on. Which shouldn't be a problem but you never know. Now it's looking like this project will run at least 3 months but probably more like 6 months over. So all these meetings and not getting stuff settled and worked on is actually great for my job security.

Without divulging what I'm working on and getting myself in trouble, let's just say that I work for a small software company that provides support and contractors to a large Federal agency. So there is a lot of political nonsense in trying to get decisions made and work actually done.

I guess it could be worse; Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers brass had a 5 hour meeting last night about his future with the team. 5 hours!? Why so long? Did they send out for pizza and watch the extended version of Lord of the Rings? Or was Brett just changing his mind about retiring every 5 minutes or so? Fish or cut bait dude.

Can someone wake me up when this Brett Favre/Packers saga is over? He's slipping into the same class of story as Lindsay, Paris and Britney. A Google news search returns 7,859 articles written about this. Britney 3,060, Lindsay 1,268 and Paris 3,050.

And Cheese-Heads, don't get all worked up over this. Go have a beer and a brat and play in the snow. You do still have snow on the ground, right?