Murphy's meeting

We had a meeting in the doomed project on Wednesday in which very nearly everything that could go wrong, did.

First of all, I wasn't prepared for it. That's only partially my fault - the meeting couldn't have been put off, and it's not like I forgot to do my stuff, it's just that I had started it but didn't have time to finish - but I should have pushed harder to get through it in time, and whether or not I could have done anything about it, it made the meeting go a little worse.

Also, it was in an unfamiliar building to me. I had only been in it once before so I don't know the layout, and big chunks of it are off-limits to people in my division so we have to sheepishly follow authorized people through the automatic security doors. It was held over there because it was scheduled on short notice and that was the only meeting room we could find. In fairness, I didn't have any problems with security this time, and some people on the team work over there so it's better for them, but still, I think my building would have been better overall.

It was also almost four hours long. That is never fun.

And despite all that time, we didn't get much done. We had 60 or so comments to discuss and resolve. We got through about 20, maybe 30. (And note that me preparing for it involves preparing more comments. So even 30 would be less than half of the real total.) People spend 10 minutes talking about things that I think could be yes or no questions, I wasn't the only person who came unprepared, our bosses were still discussing things that could lead to substantive changes, etc.

But all that is just usual unpleasantness of bad meetings. 15 minutes from the end, though, it grew into unusual unpleasantness. The unhelpful guy blew up at another team member. Now, the unhelpful guy's first language is not English, and he speaks with an accent and seems a bit sensitive about his command of the language in general. At the moment, we had just gone over some text of his and corrected errors in the process. This is my job, I do it without mentioning it except for really egregious examples, I had been doing the same thing a couple hours earlier with another team member's product while the team was talking about other things. But apparently someone else in the room was a bit too punchy about pointing out the typos in the unhelpful guy's product. He probably meant it as good-natured, old-boys-club teasing, but it had the opposite effect. The unhelpful guy just blew his stack. Got out of his seat, began pointing fingers, complaining that he shouldn't have to put up with this because he's so close to retirement, the whole deal. Wow.