Meeting Madness

For the past week, I've been attending conference calls at work for a "major" project. Now, this isn't your stay inside one room and hammer out the details kind of meeting. Or have a sleep over to finish a project for school but end up getting drunk or high or both and get no work done. No, this is the stay in your cubicle and listen to people drone on and on and on and on and on kind of meeting. The kind that makes you want to bang your head against a wall. But I digress.. What's another meeting?

Maybe it would have been infinitely easier if it wasn't scheduled at 8:30. At night.

Right. But that's not the worst part. The worst part, is that they had the balls to schedule more meetings last Friday, Saturday AND Sunday! At night. Only this time, since it was a weekend, it was scheduled not at 8:30. No they're much nicer than that. And I quote from the e-mail "I'm scheduling it at 9:30 pm since it's a Friday night. We will have this same call on Saturday night at the same time as well."

Um, what?

Apparently, there's two schools of thought here. One, it makes sense for THEM to schedule a much later meeting since they figure there's no work the next day. It's alright they don't have to be at work at 8 the next day. That's not the school I went to. That's for special people. I went to a much sane and normal school. The one where people HAVE LIVES OUTSIDE OF WORK AND WE GET TO LIVE THEM ON THE WEEKENDS!

Now, this is probably a good time to include here some undeniable facts.That there are people from the Philippines and India on this call so the project leader seems to think that a late night call California time makes sense. And that there is absolutely NO reason to meet on weekends or on ungodly hours unless there are problems. And boy, those this project have them. In droves. I'll spare the details and the like, since I still want to get paid. Suffice it to say, we're screwed and the leader is asking for a lot to get it back on track. Hence, the weekend work.

So I did what my school would do in this situation and told them to kiss my ass (not in those words, of course) and they can take that stupid project and shove it (again,not like that) and skipped every meeting and didn't turn on my laptop once. I like to think I'm nice. I attended the weekday meetings since I was paid overtime, had the opportunity to have a few beers first before calling in (read that last line again), and had genuine problems to discuss with them. Level of importance is in that order. But to take even the weekends is bullshit. Not my fault you can't get your act together.

So, here I am now on a monday waiting for 8:30 to arrive so we can get this over with and I can go home. I'm actually missing my TV shows for this crap?? I was thinking the other day that this better be worth my fucking time or I would have wasted countless hours doing something that may or may not even look good on my resume. Kind of like school (hehe i kid, i kid). There's productivity, there's loyalty, and there is stupidity. Learning to separate one from the other is something that is lost sometimes by the worker bees in corporate america. I'm not planning on checking my self into the mad house. Yet, sometimes I feel like I'm already there.