Meetings gone bad........

There's really nothing I hate worse that a meeting at work that is set up weeks in advance, only to get to the meeting and find out that the meeting facilitator didn't use that advanced notice to prepare for the meeting in any way.

First of all, they called the meeting a few weeks in advance to 'prepare for a surprise audit'. OK, if it's a surprise audit, how in the world do you know it's coming 4 weeks in advance of the actual audit? I'm thinking that a break-down of the surprise portion of the audit has occurred at some level.

Second, if you've had 4 weeks to prepare for the meeting, I expect you to do more than hand out two pages of bullet points, only to read the entire thing word-for-word to the group. Granted, the person running the meeting is not the brightest of administrative assistants, but that was just brutal. Reading things directly off your hand-out and wasting one hour of my time when I could have read it all to myself in 5 minutes just doesn't cut it. When that happened on occasion in college, I'd just leave the class. I could go back to my room, read the handout on my own, and still have 30 minutes left over to do something more productive.

One nice thing was that there was a refrigerator in the meeting room stocked with drinks. So I could at least down a couple of diet pops to keep my caffeine levels up to avoid any snoring mishaps. The funny part was that many of my co-workers were looking around at each other during the meeting. They were flashing looks and smiles at each other that seemed to say, "Is she really going to read this WHOLE THING????". It was painful.

I hope this post saves one person from a 'meeting reading' sometime in the future. If so, I've done my job.