Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.
John Kenneth Galbraith
I’d missed the darkness of the M1 at some ungodly hour; this week it was time to say hello again.
Having run out of excuses that had any shred of believability, my side-line as a part-time (very) finance broker demanded attendance at a brokerage sales meeting. The alarm went off at five and if there had been a hammer by my bedside it would have been very useful; the long road to the West Midlands lay ahead.
I rolled out of bed with the chill of cold floorboards sufficient to maintain momentum to the bathroom; I swear even the car failed to recognise me and must have thought it was being nicked.
Hob Nob Heaven
Sales meetings were never my favourite pastime enduring twenty-five years of them at Barclays. For the scraps of information gleaned the days were generally dull and very long, sustained only by heaps of machined coffee and biscuits which, the older you got, made the journeys home often vulnerable to unpredictable bodily functions sometimes culminating in desperate prayers.
The sterility of most meeting rooms often made me feel like I was in a Government detention centre. How to get through the next umpteen hours of “messages” was always the challenge of the day.
Doreen
My favourite place – if there could ever be one – was a magnificent old country pile called Appletons just outside Slough – which was a pile that could never be described as magnificent.
We arrived in all sorts of states for our days of incarceration with a range of comfy old sofas to greet us. One colleague of mine famously never made it past the sofas and spent a day sparked out as we were cooped up in the adjacent room; he didn’t miss much.
A lovely old lady called Doreen made home-cooked lunches for us, the highlight of the days by a country mile, enough to render the afternoon sessions pointless as we drifted in and out of sleep punctuated by numerous farts as the custard took hold.
There was a pitch and putt course and an outdoor pool which was utterly useless as most times I was there it was in the depths of winter. What parties that house must have seen.
Dinosaur
Back to the future and I arrived thankfully free of the usual traffic carnage; oh for a sofa and a cup of Doreen’s coffee!
Several new young bucks eventually rolled in, wrists limp from watches a Colombian drug dealer would have been proud of. I sat there doodling in my £2.99 Idle Greetings diary as they all played with various forms of technology and not a pen in sight.
Bedecked in Fred Perry tops and decorator’s jeans, I looked across and felt about sixty…which I am…but don’t need reminding. I could not resist a smile as one struggled to turn off a noisy gizmo whilst my old iPhone slept like an obedient pooch.
This Won’t Take Long
And then it began; a steady procession of guests all peddling their wares, striving to look the coolest dude on the block, a tie as rare as a Dodo bird.
You know you are in trouble when a session begins “I’ll just run through the slides as quick as I can” which means slip back in your chair and hope your eyes open in tandem with the room lights.
You wait and you wait…soon there will be the strapline that will blow you away.
Eventually, it came as our guest talked about “building our airship”. What the **** did he mean I wondered as I chased some chocolate biscuit crumbs around my stained diary and prayed for my release.
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