Mandatory Meetings: The Soul-Crushing Wasters of Life's Precious, Precious Time

Quick, name the best possible time you can think of for a three hour teacher meeting on how to use new school district software...!

Did you say "3 o'clock on a Friday afternoon right before a vacation week so everyone's exhausted because the kids are all insane because it's almost Thanksgiving and we've seen nothing but dark, depressing gray skies for the past six days ...and everyone just wants to go home and by the way make sure to make the meeting mandatory for every single faculty member even though the information applies to about less than .00000000014 percent of the employees in the district oh and also make sure to have the meeting run by effeminate ex-military personnel that act unwarrantedly rude and snippity to everyone and make everyone turn their computer monitors off for the entire first two hours of the meeting despite the fact that it's a technology training meeting"?

If so, you must be an administrator in my school district! Cool!

I would say that it was a pointless meeting, but the phrase "pointless meeting" is redundant isn't it? And trust me, I've been to my share of meetings. I served a mission, I've fulfilled many different church callings, and I am a full-time teacher. I don't think I've ever been to a meeting, in the education world at least, that couldn't be totally replaced by a single succinct e-mail. This one was so comically bad that it was actually kind of fun in a sick way.

They sat us all in this computer lab to show us this new computer software the district will be using. They made us turn off our monitors so that we had to watch what they were doing on the computer projector. Except, the screen at the fron...t of the room was illegible to everyone. It appeared as though someone had smeared three tablespoons of Vaseline on the projector lens. I could only make out a vague shape and color here and there. When we complained that we couldn't really see anything, we were told it was our own fault for sitting in the back. It was funny because the back row was about two yards away from the front row. I sat in the meeting for two hours, patiently waiting to see if they would ever even explain even the most basic functions of this new software. I assumed they would eventually get around to that part. You know what they say about assuming, though...

It didn't bother me a whole lot because as I mentioned, this software applied to me in no way whatsoever, and I wasn't allowed to go home anyway and had nothing better to do. The instructors droned on for several hours talking about "RMT su...pport" and "top loading" and "service data" and "the W-J 9 test" and "M-A billing protocol" while I sat there, oblivious. I still couldn't tell you what the software was for even with a gun to my head. I was like a sleep-deprived bonobo sitting in on a lecture on astrophysics. Common sense would dictate that maybe we could just let Mr. L and teachers like him go home a little early today since this meeting doesn't apply to him and who the heck cares anyway? But no, the corporate mindset of "you must physically stay in the building until your officially contracted time comes" is the absolute only option, ever.

Why is it in movies that when doctors, lawyers, executives, businessmen, barbers, etc. say something like, "Denise, could you cancel my 4 o'clock today? Something's come up" there's no immediate backlash from everyone? If that's how real li...fe really is, why are teachers treated like drive-thru workers at Kentucky Fried Chicken? Not saying we should just take off whenever we feel like it, but hey, we had four years of college, an insane amount of meetings, and work doesn't even end for us when we go home. Could we be trusted to make common sense judgments on when we can leave on a Friday afternoon? My goodness, you even joke about "So can I go home? All the students are gone and this meeting doesn't apply to me" and you get looks that range from horror to outright disgust. I made a sarcastic remark before we started that "This sure is a great time to have a meeting." A teacher turned to me and said, solemnly, "Friday afternoons are the only time we even have time for meetings, you know." I responded with a comment about how in my old school district we would have rebelled against this tyranny. Funny enough, that same teacher that felt compelled to correct my sarcasm got up and left twenty minutes into the meeting because she had "somewhere to be."

Huh. So I guess that Friday at 3:00 time slot wasn't as convenient for everyone as she said. How weird.

And MAYBE I might have felt bad for wanting to go home once the meeting was underway and it turned out to be the most informative, helpful, inspirational thing I could have hoped for. But all it consisted of was those two mincing tech-suppo...rt guys (one of whom was supposedly ex-military which was the excuse he used for being a total dick to everyone) running around the room and telling people how to double-click on certain boxes in the new program. I spent most of the time listening to the old guy next to me complain about how much he hates using Firefox and Google Chrome browsers because "they were full of viruses" and that his computer had "about forty viruses" on it due to using Google Chrome. He also didn't know how to use CTRL-ALT-DEL. I spent a good ten minutes teaching him how to log on to the school computer. The tech support guys ran around back and forth from person to person. For each question they answered, two more hands would shoot up and they would often leave one person, mid-sentence, to go and help two others, who would then also be left behind, also mid-sentence. Basically it was like a giant roller-rink of ineptitude.    

Some ladies offered the old guy a piece of apple pie in a styrofoam bowl. He declined it but slapped his arm around my shoulder and said, "This young man would LOVE a piece of apple pie." I actually didn't want it, but he insisted so I took... it. "Thanks for taking that. I can't eat that stuff. I'd like to, but I don't. I'm a marathon runner. Sure, it's the off-season right now but I don't eat that sweet stuff. Maybe, MAYBE on my birthday I'll have a small piece of cake. Thanks for taking that pie for me."

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Epilogue:

I dropped the pie on my way out and got whipped cream on my favorite coat. Eff off, stupid stupid meetings.