Adventures in Awful: The Meeting Killers

Post written by Pete Strub.

I look forward to Tuesday meetings like my dog looks forward to baths. At first he tries to run when he realizes what I have in mind, then, as I push him toward the bathroom door, he scrapes and claws to get away, then, when I close the door, he realizes he is defeated and hangs his head to endure the watery torture. This is how I feel every Tuesday and if it wasn’t unprofessional to run from meeting rooms and try to claw and scrape my way out, I would do it. Instead, I just have to submit to defeat every Tuesday and march my dejected bum into our staff meetings at the school where I teach to endure the verbal torture. Seriously, there is nothing I dread more than Tuesday afternoons, and the worst Tuesdays are when we have full staff meetings followed by union meetings. A friend asked me how I felt about our meetings the other day and my response was that our staff meetings made me want to kill myself and our union meetings made me want to kill everyone else. That’s a whole lot of violent thoughts for somebody who actually likes his job, so what makes these meetings so awful? I think there are three major offenders who cause meetings to go into suicidal/homicidal territory, and I’m willing to bet you know these people, too. So, here we are, this week’s adventure in awful: a look at the people who ruin meetings.

1. The Story-Teller
Like the name says, this is the person who has a “relevant” story for every topic in the meeting, except that their idea of relevant is more like word association. She just said cheese. I ate cheese once. I should tell everyone about that time I ate cheese. This must be how their minds work because there is no other explanation for the stories people tell. At every single staff meeting, I can count on hearing a story about somebody’s kid who just rode his bike without training wheels, got an A on a test, is coming home from college to visit for a day, or ate all of her vegetables at dinner the night before; I can count on at least one story about something terrible a student said to an adult (stunning, you mean teenagers are rude? I never knew); and I can count on at least one story that I truly don’t even understand. Aren’t there better times for these people to tell their stories? Can’t they share them over lunch in the staff room? Can’t they just keep a couple of stories to themselves and save us the pain? Apparently, this person has no understanding of facial expressions because if they looked around the room, they would see eye rolls, heads hanging on tables, slumped shoulders, and me attempting to turn my Bic pen into a lethal weapon.

2. The Over-Analyzer
Unlike the story-teller, this person appears to be a productive member of the meeting, but when you look closer, you find out that it just isn’t true. They fool you at first because everything they say is on-topic and usually makes sense. When I first started teaching, I thought the over-analyzers must be the really bright teachers who know what’s going on, the ones who make the building go. Then I looked closer, and I saw that the over-analyzer was just another meeting killer. The over-analyzer is the destroyer of progress. This is the person who, when you are completing an item on the meeting agenda and preparing to move forward, throws a stink bomb into the middle of things by bringing up a problem that nobody else sees. At first, it seems like this person is saving everyone from rushing into a terrible decision, but upon further investigation, you realize that the problem they identified is really just a minute detail that could have been worked out later with a couple of emails. I secretly believe that the over-analyzer relishes his/her role and purposefully waits until the last second before unleashing the progress-killing question. Ah, yesss, but what happens if it is a Tuesday after a holiday weekend during a leap year and it’s a full moon? Then what will we do? This person is the reason that I can usually look back at all of our faculty meetings from an entire school year and realize that I can count on one hand the amount of agenda items we actually finished.

3. The Griper
This person is like a mix of the story-teller and the over-analyzer, just with a big dose of grumpy. If you hand this person a $100 bill, they would probably complain about how crinkled it is, how $100 can’t possibly pay their bills, and how ugly Ben Franklin is. During meetings, this person is searching for any opportunity to tell a story that displays how oppressed he or she is, or find a problem that shows how hopeless our jobs, lives, or organization are. Their students are always the worst in the building, their room is the coldest in the winter and the warmest in the summer, their paycheck is always messed up, their schedule is the least desirable. The griper may be the worst offender of all in meetings. Story-tellers and over-analyzers are annoying, but the griper has the ability to hang a cloud of depression over an entire room and make every meeting feel like an exercise in futility. Organizations run on hope and the employees’ belief that they can make the organization great. The griper rips hope up, spits on it, and stomps on it like an angry little minion. This is the person who makes me want to turn my now-lethal Bic pen on myself.

Unfortunately, we can’t just point the finger at the gripers, story-tellers, and over-analyzers because the truth is that these people simply suffer from something that most of us suffer from: self-centeredness. They don’t realize how their actions affect everyone else. They don’t understand that when they tell that story, they are making everyone stay at work five more minutes when they could be home with their families or doing something important like playing video games. They don’t understand that their over-analyzing is just stalling necessary progress. And, the truly sad case, the gripers don’t understand what negativity does to people. They don’t understand the way it eats you from the inside out and steals your joy, hope, and energy.

We’re the same way, though, aren’t we? I am terribly self-centered. Heck, I write about myself every week and expect people to read it. But I’m self-centered in more important and awful ways, too. When I’m tired, I don’t think about how my cranky demeanor affects my students at school. When my wife wants to go to new restaurants on our date night, I immediately cringe inside because I want my type of food. When I sit in meetings, I only think about how painful it is for me. I never think about how much the story-teller just craves attention, or how much the over-analyzer craves validation, or how many times the griper has been burned by people. People are self-centered by nature and it takes effort to move past self-centeredness.

I can’t believe I’m about to say this because it is going to be painful for me, but I think it’s our job to move out of our self-centeredness that makes us annoyed by and judgmental toward the people who bug us and open our eyes to see their situations. Either that or invest in some very discreet iPod headphones and bob away in your next meeting.

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