As Promised, Meeting Etiquette

There's more to the Sandra story, but I thought I'd break it up a bit and get to some of the promised items.

There are two kinds of meetings. There are the productive ones, which you leave feeling like stuff got accomplished. Then there are the unproductive ones, which go on forever and you leave you feeling about meetings like you feel about a carton of bad milk: you don't ever want to experience one again. Unfortunately, the latter type is more prevalent to the former.

One of the best ways to ruin a meeting is to refuse to shut up. And there's a whole bunch of people that are guilty of it. Abby's a pain in the ass, because she asks question after question, and although she's trying to be thorough, it gets annoying when she asks the same question three or four times, wording it a slightly different way each time. Arrington's another bigtime offender, but it's mostly because he's a whiner. It should be noted that MacDougal, for all the crap I have given him herein, deserves a lot of credit for his meeting prowess. He doesn't talk unless he has something important to say, and whenever he asks a question, it's one that everyone else should have asked but didn't. He's some kind of meeting savant, I think.

Anyway, we had a meeting last week, and Abby started asking a question... her questions are always in twenty-seven parts with multiple subquestions... and I started saying over and over again in my head "Stop talking, stop talking, stop talking", trying to send some sort of telepathic message to her so that she'd shut her mouth.

It worked, but not quite the way I wanted to. Turns out that I wasn't so much saying it in my head as I was saying it out loud. All of sudden I zoned back in and everyone was looking at me. Wallace waited until he gets eye contact from me, then said, "A.J., is there something you want to add, or can Abby finish asking her question?" I looked over at Abby, who was rightfully pissed, apologized and slunk back in my seat.

Oops.