Meetings
At YMG, we have a lot of meetings. We have meetings to schedule meetings, which are cancelled and replaced by meetings to discuss the process by which we schedule meetings. New meetings are invariably scheduled to repeat by default; not to suggest that they will actually repeat at fixed intervals, but rather because finding a meeting room can be like a turf war, and it never hurts to plan ahead just in case.
We have face-to-face meetings, one-on-one meetings, phone meetings, video meetings. We have meetings conducted in every possible combination of those modes. We have video meetings with simultaneous phone meetings, because the microphones on the video conference machines are on the fritz.
Yesterday morning, I participated in an early morning telephone conference meeting using my cellphone on my way to work. I arrived just in time to rush to a video conferencing room to dial in for my weekly team meeting. The room on the other end of the connection was dark and empty. I was shortly informed via IM that our meeting had been postponed a half hour, and in the interim I should dial in to another phone conference meeting (which included all but one of the participants of the weekly team meeting). A half hour later, my teammates excused themselves from that meeting, and thirty seconds later appeared on my video conferencing screen. My boss showed up and we conducted our meeting. We got kicked out of the room thirty minutes hence, and my boss suggested that we continue our discussion over the phone (though he could sadly not attend, having another meeting to attend.) We continued our discussion over the phone (with the help of SubEthaEdit) until I had to excuse myself to have a lunch meeting with our principal architect. Our team resumed our meeting after lunch until we finished an hour later. My boss, meanwhile had finished his meeting, and since he is so rarely in LA he thought we should have a one-on-one meeting. We met over coffee until I had to excuse myself to attend the second part of the earlier phone conference meeting which our team meeting had so untimely interrupted. Get all that?
I spent the last thirty minutes of the work day at my desk, IM off, email closed, earplugs in my ears. I tried in vain to find a syntax error to correct; a line of code missing a semicolon; a minor bug to fix. Nothing.
It used to puzzle me that there are so few conference rooms, and a nonexistent conference room scheduling system, making room-squatting so prevalent. But today I realized the genius of this scheme. The conference room shortages are planned—supply is kept doggedly in check. This ensures that at all times, some fraction of the workforce is forced to be at their desks getting actual work done. Its brilliant. But some days it just doesn't work.