Xiaoniu 小妞

I’ve been completely swamped with meetings the past few weeks. I don’t know how it happened, but I seem to have been volunteered to help with so many projects that only thing I do is attend meetings. I don’t get much done anymore. And with so many meetings I’m starting to get very bored and I’m trying to find ways to entertain myself.

I should probably be more attentive during these meetings, but I’m starting to think that many of them are just a waste of time. Some team leaders have meetings with others just so that they can hear themselves talk. Others have meetings because they feel they should have them, but they probably couldn’t tell you why. Nothing really gets accomplished. Every meeting is the same. We talk about the same things, nothing new comes up and we all know we are going to meet 7 days later to say the same things.

There is one meeting that I attend weekly where some (maybe less than some) things actually get done. Last week, I just wasn’t in the mood to be there and I spent my time observing everybody. I even seemed to have a non-verbal conversation with the woman across the table. We both were thinking the same thing about somebody else at the table.

One of the woman at the table is a pretty important person involved with an important project. However, she has some very poor communication skills. It’s inevitable that whenever she opens her mouth during any meeting to say something that she starts out talking in a quiet voice that continues to get softer and softer until she is practically whispering. She does it all the time. I’m amazed that she has gotten so far in life thinking that this is a good way to communicate with other people. You want to ask her to speak up, but then again you might just want her to keep her trap shut too. :roll:

The woman that sat across from me kept rolling her eyes roll and kept looking at me as to find out if I could actually hear her. I usually just ignore whatever the other woman is whispering so I don’t really get too upset. Thankfully somebody actually asked her to speak up during our last meeting, but that lasted only a couple seconds before her voice lowered to a whisper again. The funny part about this woman is that if somebody else attempts to interupt her she continues, but will raise her voice up to a normal volume. She doesn’t stop talking though. Just keeps on going. Blah, blah, blah. :roll:

The woman that was sitting across from me is also very animated with her gestures when somebody else is talking about stuff she doesn’t know about. She is a legacy mainframe programmer; the kind of person that has been using mainframes for the past 25 years. We start talking about Java, JSF, J2EE, DAL, DAO, SOAP, XML, etc. and her eyes just glaze over. Now she starts shifting in her seat and making grunts because she has no idea what we are talking about.

Like I said I should probably be more attentive at these meetings. I just with there weren’t so many of them. How can you get work done when you are never at your desk and your forced to jump from project to project throughout the day. I’m at the point now where I tell my boss that I only work on one project a day. That doesn’t stop the meetings, but it helps me get things done.