The Rants of Issachar

Why did I go to work today? It's a "Search Conference" for the school. I hate these things. The meeting's been going on for a half hour and we've only talked about what we're going to do in the meeting. Or rather we've listened to the leader guy tell us about it. Of course none of us could possibly have figured this out at the first part of the conference on Thursday night. So why am I here again? At least I'm online so I can post.

Oh, and there's something seriously wrong with any meeting where quotes like these ones are peppered all over the place:

• “ideas we want to unpack”
• “adaptive approach”
• “reflecting on unpacking the issues”
• “that would have been really divisive in the community”
• “we’ll come up to the solutions to a lot of the issues and you’ll own them”

Those all came out in less than 5 minutes from the same guy. I know these SCSBC guys mean well, but still... I'm reminded of David Malm's comment when we were back-country skiing and one of the guys suggested talking about what the week had meant to us. "Feelings?!? I don't want to talk about my f#$*ing feelings! This isn't a f#$*ing retreat!"

Update: 10:32am
Well we're now actively trying to prevent the meeting from producing anything. I ended up in the Finance group a little while ago and we quickly identified problems and started working on solutions. The leader guy came round and noticed that we were doing solutions... Apparently we weren't at the solutions part of the discussion, so we needed to "unpack the problems" more. Gah! We identified the problems and began working on solutions. That's what you're supposed to do. But instead we sat around and reworded the problems until we were allowed to work on solutions...

Update: 11:50am
It never fails. (Some) people hate change. Suggest something that unfamiliar and you get "we looked at that before and we decided that X was better". Well apparently X wasn't such a good idea because it didn't work and now you've got this huge problem. Gah!

Update: 12:10pm
This "Search Conference" is actually interesting on a level that has nothing to do with the subject. Watching the dynamics of the people is strange. You know all the complaints (sensible) people have about meetings? (i.e. bureaucratic navel gazing) This day is such a good example of that problem. It's... educational. So maybe I can learn how to navigate through messes like this.

Update: Two Days Later...
How wise it to post complaints about a work meeting on your publicly accessible blog that at least one co-worker knows about? I guess I'll find out. But since you didn't show up to the event yourself Ron, I suppose you won't see me out.

Posted by:  rward

go, andrew!

Posted by:  kris

working on a saturday - that's definitely terrible... almost as bad as going to a concert that you thought was going to be a jazz concert but it turns out that it's some avante-gard-not-so-good-improv music and you can't get your money back even though you only stayed for five minutes.

pretty much, it sucks eh?

Posted by:  issachar

Yeah, that jazz did pretty much suck. Scratching seemingly randomly on your instruments... Seems like art to me. Maybe if I was taking drugs it would have seemed better. Watching that guy try to play the piano by crawling inside of it was interesting although he did seem to be molesting it at times.

Posted by:  kris

:: "Maybe if I was taking drugs it would have seemed better."

haha! agreed!

i suppose it could have been worse... at least we had good company ;)
the bubble-tea afterwards was very good...