Rainy Days and Meetings Always Get Me Down

Today my students have the day off.
I do not. Why? Because I have meetings all day.

On one hand, I'm ready for a kid-free day. (And they're ready for a teacher-free day, so our offenses cancel each other out.)  On the other hand, meetings rank right up there with tetanus shots and all-soprano opera.

If you're like me and you have a two second attention span, plus a natural aversion to charts, graphs, and data disaggregation, then you might benefit from some of my Meeting Survival Tips, taken from my yet-to-be published book Meetings Can Be As Lame as Water Boarding and Fire Ants. These survival tips are good for meetings only. They will not work in class, for you students. Because we all know you WILL use that information someday. All of it. Somehow. Just like I use my geology and botany info every day. I can't tell you how many times I've had to identify a rock or leaf during the course of a day. Anyway…

Taken from the chapter titled, “Well, I WOULDN'T Be Growling If Someone Had Brought Some Starbucks.” Rules for surviving a meeting…

1. Attend meeting with mime face paint on. Permanent smile. And permanent creepiness. Nobody will bother you, look at you, or ask you to climb out of your imaginary glass box.

2. Bring enough binders and notebooks so you can build a Fort of Nap Time. It would be rude to peek into someone's Fort of Nap Time. You might want to email a memo with this instruction prior to the meeting, so you are insured uninterrupted sleep and relaxation. Plus it's a great excuse to finally use that Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper.

3. Bring your favorite magazines and get others to help you complete the quizzes. What's more important–learning new information that involves you keeping your job OR figuring out whether your relationship style is Team Edward, Jacob, or Jackson Stewart?

4. Bring the latest issue of People and have the twisted relationship of the Jolie-Pitts analyzed by the end of the meeting, complete with flow charts and illustrated diagrams to send to Dr. Phil. Or to fold into paper airplanes and send to Mr. I'm Too Cool To Turn Off My Cell Phone sitting five rows back.

5. Plan your lunch escape route. I usually start this within 30 seconds of being seated. I also like to create options A, B, and C, which gives me alternate routes and choices in case the meeting goes over or a chicken truck has turned over yet AGAIN in the center of the highway, blocking the way between me and a Value Meal.

6. Practice all those Sue Sylvester-isms you've been storing up. “My parents were famous Nazi hunters. So they weren't around a lot.” Or…”You think this hard? I'm passing a gallstone as we speak. That is hard!”

7. Bring a Michael Jackson face mask in case you sit by the Person Who Daily Mistakes Her Perfume For Raid Wasp and Hornet Killer.  (Item 7B, pray for companionship for these people, because obviously they don't have a best friend to let them know they have a certain air of stinky.)

8. Bring snacks. Not only does this keep you happy, but it gets you instant friends. And if you leave your peanut M&Ms out overnight, your stale chewing sounds will completely block out the speaker's voice. I like to use these during the presentation given by the person whose speech and PowerPoint are exact duplicates and match word-for-word. And when Mr. I'm Too Cool To Turn Off My Cell Phone asks questions over info we've already gone over, but he was too busy talking to Fantasy Football Buddy Number 3.

9. Do not write comments on those end-of-presentation “anonymous” surveys in the voice of Snooki or JWOWW . They know your handwriting. Trust me.

10. During the required, “Turn to the person on your left and tell them one thing you learned” time, always speak first. I usually like to begin with the words, “So…what did you think?”

Clearly that chapter is a work in progress. I'm grateful for my meeting tomorrow because I can do some more field research for my future release, Meetings Can Be As Lame as Water Boarding and Fire Ants. I haven't found a publisher for it yet, but my agent has had these two words to say about it already: Bidding. War.

Have a great Monday.