One thing I’ve never really gotten used to on the west coast is how people go to meetings. Today was a perfect example.
I had a meeting at 1 pm and I arrived a few minutes early, because that’s what you do when attending meetings with people from the east coast. There were some people in “Yosemite” conference room when I arrived, so I patiently waited outside for them to finish.
1 pm rolled around and they weren’t leaving, but I also didn’t see anyone else arriving for the meeting. I thought maybe that I had the room wrong, so I took a lap around the floor to see if anyone I recognized was waiting in there. Didn’t see anyone so I returned to wait outside the conference room. 1:05 arrived and still there was no one, so I took another lap. Maybe I got the date or time wrong? It was in my Treo though.
After a full lap, I ran into a coworker who told me that the meeting was at 1 today, but in the “Yellowstone” conference room. There are plenty of National Parks, couldn’t they name them a little more distinctively?
Anyway, after wandering around some more, we found a conference room map and then the room. At 1:07 we were just the second and third people to arrive. Of course there was someone else in the room already, so we had to kick them out.
Seven minutes into the meeting, the first task was to get the presentation up. This wasn’t my presentation of course, but what else did I have to do while others showed up? The computer in the conference room actually worked, except for the small fact that there was no network cable attached to it. And it wasn’t just unplugged – there simply was no cable. So someone else ran out to find a network cable. Amazingly the projector worked since those usually never do.
In the meantime a few more people showed up. At 1:12, the organizer of the meeting appeared and began trying to figure out how to conference in the participants from remote sites on the phone. He tried this and no one was there, which was strange. So I sent an IM from my Treo to Todd who was supposed to be calling in. He said he was waiting for us. Something wasn’t right. So the organizer called the admin and got a bunch of different conferencing numbers. I’m sending confusing IMs back and forth trying to fix this. Then the admin calls back and gives us the right numbers and someone else sends out an email to everyone who was invited of the correct numbers.
Finally we called the right number and everyone was there. I’m amazed they waited for 25 minutes. The meeting then started promptly at 1:30, just before the final participants moseyed in.
The meeting was pretty free-form, with half-presentation and half-discussion. At 2 pm, people started gathering outside for their meeting in the room at 2. So we got kicked out.
No wonder people hate meetings. With meetings like these, it’s a wonder we get anything done at all! Campus wi-fi would sure help the networking situation, but I’m not sure what to do about these west coast meeting attitudes.