Tuesday, 2 p.m. – Quiet now. I’m listening to a Microsoft presentation about a desktop program that’s supposed to make my job a bit easier. It’s fairly interesting as far as these things go, but, as usual, the speaker is showing undue excitement over something that amounts to nothing more than an internal technology tool, not meant for public consumption. About 75 people are in the audience. Some are hanging on every word, some are sipping lattes trying to stay awake, and about a dozen are rudely tapping away on laptops.
This is a chronic habit of some Microsoft people. Once they get their hands on a laptop – or, if they’re deemed worthy, a Tablet – they make it a fixture, lugging it from meeting to meeting to lunch, and then to another meeting. Not that I’m judging, mind you. I admire those who are able to squeeze the most out of every minute of the day. Hey, if you get to a meeting five minutes early, why not log on to the laptop and answer a few emails? But as I write this – right now – I count seven people in my immediate area who have laptop open and Outlook launched. That’s seven people who are writing emails rather than listening to the speaker.
Now I realize that a lot of people at Microsoft have more important jobs than mine. In fact, it’s possible that, of the company’s 50,000 positions, mine is the least important of all. But even a Biff Loman like me knows that the speaker has gone through a good deal of “sturm und drang” in putting his presentation together, and it’s just common courtesy to give him your attention, at least for the first 30 seconds.
Because my job is so unimportant, I don’t have to attend many meetings. This is fine with me because, the way I see it, one meeting a day is one too many. The higher you climb at Microsoft, the more meetings you have to attend. Some of them you even have to organize yourself, which is just morally wrong. If you ever get to the director level, you’re into schedule overload, which means that the company pays you so much money that they expect you to attend multiple meetings at the same time. Because this is impossible outside of a Quentin Tarantino movie, the director must physically attend one meeting while “conferencing” into another, rendering his input as ineffective for either. This explains why a lot of directors are losing their hair or their minds, or both.
What many of my fellow blue-badgers don’t seem to understand is that you can’t just make an appearance at a meeting like you do at a cocktail party. Unless your name is Gates or Ballmer, people really aren’t impressed by your presence at their meeting if you’re not actually contributing something. You’re there to do a task. It may be to take notes and disseminate them among your team. It may be to act as a sounding board for the speaker. Or it may be just to sit there and absorb information, which is difficult to do if you’re emailing your broker telling him to dump your Sun stock. (Ok, so I’m reading the guy’s email in front of me. Don’t judge me; I’m sensitive.)
Which brings me back to the people sitting next to me. They really need to put their laptops away and pay attention to the speaker, who happens to be giving a very important talk about a subject I can’t quite remember at the moment. (Oh, right, the desktop tool.) But even though I’m not listening to this guy drone on and on (and on) doesn’t mean everyone else shouldn’t. Like most self-absorbed people, I have a double standard when it comes to rules. For example, I think everyone should have to drive the speed limit except me. I don’t see where this would cause any problems on our roads, and it would make me a lot happier.
So please. Regardless of how important you become, be courteous. When you find yourself attending a meeting, feel free to multi-task, but don’t tune the speaker out until you’ve given him a fair chance. And when you’re in Washington state, drive the speed limit.
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