Staff meetings, or shootout at Durango Gulch
The monthly staff meeting was today precisely at
noon, as it always is, and I was there on time, just as I always am, and just
as always I spent much of the time during this monthly staff meeting sitting in
my uncomfortable chair wondering what it is about monthly staff meetings that
make me wish I were dead. I can’t say for certain why this is my inevitable
reaction to monthly staff meetings, but I strongly suspect that the reason I
feel this way is that, as the late and much lamented dearly departed Akaky
Bashmachkin, no one could require me to go to monthly staff meetings, and if,
like the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who attends all staff meetings held at the
University College London despite his having died in 1832, my presence was a
requirement no matter what my state of temporal being, I would not care one way
or the other, apathy being one of the salient characteristics of those who are
blind, deaf, dumb, and dead.
Unfortunate, I fear, but all too true; the dead are the very embodiment
of the low information voter whose lack of historical knowledge and pride in
our civic institutions are the bane of our modern political discourse. It is no
wonder then, I think, that most of the dead vote for Democrats.
The interested observer can usually distinguish
monthly staff meetings from other congregations of like-minded people by the
monotonous drone. In this monthly staff meetings differ from baseball games,
for example, where the crowd noises are generally happy, especially if the home
team is winning, horse races, where the crowd noises are imploring,
particularly if the horse you’ve just bet the ranch on is starting to fade
coming into the home stretch, and the St. Patrick’s Day parade, where the crowd’s
noise is generally both loud and peristaltic; green beer will do that to
you. Monthly staff meetings, on the
other hand, drone on and on and on like a set of out of tune bagpipes, although
that in itself poses the question: if the bagpipes you are listening to were
out of tune, how would you know? Yes,
the drone, like the beat, goes on, its monotony enhanced with subtle undertones
of minutiae and spiced every so often with fresh organic ennui just brought in
from the garden, where even the woodchucks wouldn’t eat the stuff. Woodchucks have
standards, after all, unlike your average organic vegan locavore, for whom the
taste of dirt is the imprimatur of their moral and cultural superiority over
the unwashed and unenlightened masses of their countrymen, who delight in
stuffing their pie holes with hamburgers, French fries, and other such disgusting
rot.
And what do we discuss at the monthly staff
meeting? Nothing of any consequence.
Directives will be promulgated, policies will be implemented, staff inputs will
be sought, actions will be discussed, it is all very passive voice, as if the
directives and the policies and the staff inputs will pop up all by themselves
like poison ivy or a long lost relative at the reading of your rich aunt’s
will. And what are staff inputs, anyway?
I have been on the staff of the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily
bread for longer than I care to think about and in all of that time no one has ever
asked me for an input. People have asked me for help, people have asked me for
money, and one guy asked me to stop banging on the men’s room door until he was
done banging his girlfriend—yes, that was embarrassing, thank you for asking—but
no one’s ever asked for an input. So I have no clue what a staff input is, except
that the people who run this place think so much of them that they call monthly
staff meetings in order to bore the staff to tears talking about them. Perhaps
they do it because they can. In The Rebel, Albert Camus wrote, “tyrants
conduct monologues above a million solitudes.” Well, there’s not quite a million of us—we wouldn’t
all fit in the building if there were—but we do have some people who like to
talk whether or not they have anything to say and some other people who like to
talk when they know that the people they are talking to have to sit there and
listen.
The interesting thing about monthly staff
meetings, perhaps the only interesting thing from a purely scientific point of
view, is how the monthly staff meeting refutes key aspects of Einstein’s theory
of special relativity. Einstein
postulated that as a physical object grows nearer and nearer to the speed of
light, time itself would start to slow down, until a few seconds at near light
speed for that object could see the passing of years, decades, centuries in
normal time. And yet this mycological cesspit moves no faster than the rest of
the planet, and despite this, time slows down to an unendurable crawl during
the monthly staff meetings just as surely as it does at near light speed. Why
time would make an exception to the physical rules of the universe for a
monthly staff meeting is not known, but as someone who has to endure these
temporal slowdowns twice a month (once for the entire staff and another for
department heads) I cannot discount the possibility that time does this because
time is a big jerk. This makes as much
sense as any other reason that is out there, I think, and frankly, the idea
appeals to the broad streak of rampant paranoia that makes up a good part of my
personality.
Labels: bureaucracy, egregious mold pit, International Communist Conspiracy, our happy little burg, Roberta Vasquez, staff meetings, yellow cling peaches in heavy syrup
