I took a business analysis class once from a guy who told a story about meetings. The place where he worked had some sort of major financial debacle in a South American city. They lost a bunch of money on a project.

They started having meetings to try to resolve the problem. They spent about 4 hours in a meeting and all that got discussed was whose fault it was. Nothing got resolved. They called another meeting for the next day, and went through exactly the same process.

Finally about a half-hour into the third meeting, he stood up and declared that it was his fault. Of course, he had nothing to do with the project at all, but he figured if they could get the blame out of the way, they could get on with discussing a resolution to the problem. He said it didn't work perfectly, but they did get somewhat back on track.


>I hardly attended any meeting . . . . really. ;-)
>
>
>FFFfffff! Sounds eupomistically a lot like "meeting engineer" to me! :-)
>
>>As I recall, my title was "IT Advisory Specialist" and I agree with you completely.
>>Grady
>>
>>>But . . . I too have worked in places like that. It make you wonder how they get things done.
>>Grady
>>
>>That's the point! They DIDN'T get things done - they just talked about them - hence "now defunct".
>>I once worked for a large bank that had a "working party" to decide, among others, which WP the bank would addopt as "corporate". At the time I had a version of IBM's DW4 (or some such), which didn't have the facility of creating indexes or TOC's. The document I was working on desperately needed these, which, while waiting, I had to do manually. It took me sevaral weeks and cost more, in my time, than it would have to purchase, say, Word, even temporarily till they decided. I FEAR meeting engineers.
>>
>>I once had a girl friend who was an OT at a hospital. She hated the ward meetings. One dragged on for hours and at the end still hadn't resolved its sole purpose - where to store unused wheelchairs.
>>
>>>
>>>Grady
>>>
>>>LOL
>>>
>>>This your own work or copied from an amusing article? So true. Reminds me of when I was working for Link-Miles (the simulator people - now defunct), and this harks back to the discussion on job titles a few weeks ago: There was a (worst misnomer in the English language) "working group" who's job it was to meet several times a week in a glass-panneled room, and none of us were ever privy to their proceedings. As we were all titled hardware- or software-engineers, this group got to be disparagingly referred to as "meeting engineers"
>>>
>>>Terry