My Dear Niece Snakeash,

You have seen the sitcoms. You have the comics. You know the memes. But you will soon learn that there is more truth here. Comedy often is the last recourse of the miserable and in this trope, there is plenty of material to mine.

What is strange is everyone knows it too.

“Hahaha, meetings to have meetings, hahah” is not an infrequent refrain in workplaces across the upper-realm AND in the nether-region realm.

But in further proof of the tried truism of the ‘definition of insanity,’ the even more common refrain is to ‘schedule scheduling a meeting to talk about the abundance of meetings.’

Funny satire, right?

Wrong, it’s another meme.

We have ALSO acknowledged our propensity to solve the issue by liberal application of more meetings in popular media.

What’s truly curious is this awareness has done nothing to limit the problem. Rather we point it out like casual observers in a slasher flick, wherein we occasionally get picked off one by one.

~Aunt Toutlips, while actively hunting virgins and temps

What the morons don’t understand about meetings is the purpose is actually to delay, frustrate, and otherwise lead to actions aside from making decisions.

Look at the generational makeup of any random group. See how it’s comprised of those fully capable of making decisions themselves?

How are the able to make decisions in other areas?

Why, then, are they subjecting themselves to the perceived indignantly of consensus or group-though?  

Because each of those people doesn’t want to bear the brunt of decision-making for whatever the topic of the meeting is.

But do you see the tactical implication for those of us blessed to work in HR?

We now know every potential landmine in our respective workplaces by simply following which topics have meetings.

Once we know the path of our avoidance, which surely leads to success, we can also drop the unwitting into roles that will churn into oblivion under the weight of trying to change, improve, or otherwise address the topic of the meeting.

Ours is a simple charge: change nothing.

Therefore, we must find the means to this end—and generally, that is a pointless, soul-ducking, and posterior-numbing meeting.

Aunt Toutlips

Author Notes