I forgot I had a meeting at 9:15. When 9:35 rolled around and I happened to look up at the conference room, I realised that the door was shut and that the meeting was happening behind it.
"Sorry," I whispered as I closed the door. I slipped into the nearest available seat and tried to figure out what was going on.
Oh boy do I love a subtext. The room was already politely seething but not, I should add, with me. I flicked my eyes around the room, watching out for those little microexpressions that tell a story all of their own. It quickly turned out that the microexpressions weren't necessary.
"How would you all feel about working extra hours then?" asked the Team Leader with an air of exasperation. It was like removing the pin from a hand grenade and listening to it clatter to the floor.
Kerboom. It doesn't affect me, thankfully; my work is slightly different, which meant that I was shielded from the blast. I did feel a little sorry for the Team Leader though. It's the unavoidable curse of middle management - pressure from above and criticism from below. It must be really rather lonely.
I've sat through quite a few explosive meetings actually. I remember one where a person quickly descended into a quick-fire volley of furious F words and left in a thundrous whirlwind, slamming the door and shaking the lintels behind him. In another, a friend of mine crawled underneath the tables and banged the floor in frustration, claiming in no uncertain terms that sales people are all obsessed with the size of their appendages.
It wasn't the best, considering it was a meeting... with sales people.
Perhaps the key to blowing up a meeting is to have all three elements of the fire triangle - fuel, ignition and oxygen:
The fuel is easy to come by. It bubbles away at most people's desks as they tap away at their emails with their furrowed brows and hidden agendas. It's that unspoken frustration we all get when things aren't well communicated or our toes get trodden on. Actually, if we let it build up, it'll spontaneously combust eventually I reckon. Nevertheless we take it to the kitchen, to the bathrooms, to the corridors, and of course right into the middle of the meeting room.
The ignition is usually a trigger word or phrase, much like the weary Team Leader used this morning. Without anything to light, it would just be a harmless thing to say, perhaps even a bit of kitchen-chit-chat.
The oxygen would be our attitudes, which billow up and create the flammable atmosphere. Fill a room with bad attitude, carry in a little bubbling frustration of your own and light the fuse. Boom.
Meanwhile in other news, it looks like my problem with the computers has been resolved and I'm not on a collision course with my P45. Plus, the meeting I narrowly avoided last week happened and I had much more time to collect up my golden tickets before the final whistle. Result!
It feels like a proper Friday. Just hope I don't blow it up.
No comments:
Post a Comment