Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

How To Survive Unbearable Meetings

Last week I sat through the worst meeting in the world, and survived. It was a perfect cocktail of all the classic ingredients of unbearable meetings: powerpoint slides packed densely with unreadable text; a droning, inflectionless voice on the other end of a conference call reading those slides, verbatim; crushingly dull subject matter; and a room so full of fellow sufferers that the gravitational pull of peer pressure prevented us from achieving sufficient escape velocity to run screaming from the room.

It lasted an hour and a half, give or take an eternity, and at the end of it everybody rushed out so fast that they set off a little cascade of sonic booms, like popping popcorn. Most people were crying; a few hurled themselves ineffectually at locked and shatterproof windows; a mini-epidemic of epileptic seizures shuddered through the crowd; rational people beat their heads bloody against walls to dislodge the memory of the horror. A corps of grief counselors fanned out through the wailing throngs and administered massive doses of anti-depressants, intravenously.

Most of us survived, but not unscathed. Every so often, when you hear a blood-curdling scream echoing down the halls, or see some poor distraught geek running naked past your office batting at his body sobbing “Get the meeting off me! Get it off me!“, you know that it hasn’t quite gone away. That it’ll never really go away.

But in the spirit of that old maxim, whatever doesn’t kill you will probably get around to killing you eventually, I’ve put together a little list of tips to help the unfortunate prole survive the horror of a company meeting. Follow this guidebook, and you’ll probably get through it, with most of your sanity intact.

1. Visualize a happier time: childhood, a vacation at the beach, your first kiss. Now set that time on fire, and cackle maniacally over its ashes. Do this for the same reason that the retreating Russian army set fire to their cities during WWII: so the enemy can’t get hold of them. Do not let the meeting take control of your precious memories. They will become process zombie recollections, and turn on you, spouting business maxims. Your old girlfriend will pull back from that first kiss, and smile, and say: “Oh Honey. Are you maximizing your vertically leveraged F2F business imperatives?” And then your brain will eat itself. Do not let this happen.

2. Try deep breathing exercises. Not your normal deep breathing: I’m talking about hyperventilation, enough to flood your brain with oxygen and knock you out. Or, at the very least, drown out the droning, horrible voice that holds you captive.

3. Start singing the Star Spangled Banner. This will almost certainly either bring the meeting to halt, or get you ejected. The beauty of this technique is that they can’t make you stop, and they can’t punish you for it. If they do, simply call up the Department of Homeland Security and let them know that your company is quashing your patriotism and attempting to suppress your love of country. This will undoubtedly get some senior executives sent off to Guantanamo, but, hey: this is war. It’s either you or them.

4. Chew off your fingers. Start with the pinky, which isn’t really very useful anyway. The physical pain will dull the mental anguish, and allow you to hold onto your sanity. If you chew slowly enough, you should be able to make that finger last for the duration of a standard two-hour meeting. If the meeting goes longer, move onto the pinky of your other hand, and then inward, toward the thumb. This technique should be used carefully, of course. I’ve known some people stuck in all-day CMM compliance meetings who’ve chewed off whole arms, up to the shoulder. A good rule of thumb is to stop at the elbow. But, you know, you do what you have to.

5. Claw out your eyes. This worked for Oedipus, who blinded himself after he found out that he’d killed his father and had sex with his mother. Of course, sitting through this goddam meeting is probably far worse than incest and patricide, but there are OSHA regulations mandating that companies release employees from meetings in the the event of an eye-clawing-out incident, so this will definitely spring you.

These steps may seem extreme, but, trust me, they’re not. Sometimes your only choices are bad, worse, and unspeakably horrible. Choose bad. Or choose worse. Just don’t let unspeakably horrible happen to you.

This is great advice. The problem is that when you are stuck in one of these meetings, it seems as though your brain can’t tell your body to run. Perhaps you should laminate these words of wisdom into wallet size cards for reference.

Another idea would be for us to start a service that allows someone to text message a number that would then call the person back thereby providing an escape mechanism. We could charge pretty much anything we wanted for such a service. In fact it could even be used to get out of bad dates, functions with the inlaws, or pretty much any life threatening situation.

That, sir, is brilliant. We’ll make millions. Millions!

You are my hero! This article should be sent to every corporation in existence, burnt on each presenter’s head/back with fire, oh we should contact the Red Cross about this, for FINALLY you have found not one, but multiple cures to this epidemic.