Mr. Meeting

As I look at the year that is rapidly approaching, it turns out that 2009 is going to be the Year of the Meeting.

For starters, I will be the Marketing VP for the Ames Jaycees in 2009. That means two board meetings a month in addition to 2 membership meetings a month.

I will also be on the Board of Trustees at the church. I don't know exactly what the Board of Trustees does, but apparently it involves staring at water damage to the ceiling and then voting on it. I vote "yes" that is water damage. I'm not sure how many meetings that will entail, but I'm hoping that it isn't too many.

It also seems like I might end up on the Board of the Methodist Men. I'm not sure if this is a done deal, but I think that the meet twice a month in between church services.

That should be enough meetings for me, I might have to abstain from all meetings in 2010.

As it is, my years working for the Evil Clown Empire conditioned me to hate meetings. We only really had 2 Store Manager Meetings and we rotated through them.

The first meeting I will call the Boat Captain Meeting. The old man that owned the company would give a stirring story about how managers were doing to much work. My favorite was when he compared managers to boat captains.

If you were a captain of a boat and you saw that you were going to slam into something ahead, would a good captain run down into the boiler room and start shoveling coal or would they grab the wheel and steer the ship out of danger?

The point of the meeting was that he wanted more staff added to every shift so that managers could manage rather than shoveling coal.

The next manager meeting would always be about how labor was too high and we needed to cut labor.

This of course would be followed by the Boat Captain Meeting. It was an endless cycle.