Wednesday 03 June 2020
The first few weeks of lockdown felt like one long day. Every day I double checked the day and date, just to get a grip on my totally warped sense of time. After a while I became less dependent on looking at a calendar to sense what day it was, until the series of long weekends in the past couple of weeks. Sometimes there were 3-day weekends, other times 4-day weekends. Now I’m lost again.
Today at 10:00, I dialed into a meeting that was scheduled for 02 June 10:00. I was all alone in the call, wondering what kept my colleague, when a notification popped up that my colleague had started up the virtual meeting. A bit confused, I clicked on ‘Join’, and there he was!
After our chat, I went back to my calendar to see what meeting I had acutally dialed into originally, and I realized it was a meeting from the day before. In my head, it was the second day of work this week, so it must be Tuesday. I'll have another attempt at learning the days of the week next week.
For those wondering whether I missed the meeting on Tuesday: I didn’t.
Boomer Blog Week 2
“Our team meeting is like a group of toddlers all sitting in a sandbox, building their own castle and not paying attention to each other” - Co-worker
I might have been inclined to take offense to that statement if I didn’t also think it was true. Anyway, that co-worker’s quitting now. R.I.P.
So for this week I’ve decided to expand a little bit on why our team meetings have so little actual interaction. After all, we’re a team so why aren’t we all team-like and teamy?
Our team consists of people who all work in different locations by themselves. We’re not the type of co-workers that have lunch together and hang out by the water cooler, because our water coolers are sometimes 100 km apart. Working in a place by yourself without any colleagues is usually done by people who are very good at working by themselves. And people who work well alone, work well alone. What I’m trying to say while talking in circles because I’m trying to be nice about it, is that no one got this job because they’re a good team-player. Working together with people who are good at working alone, can be a struggle. Especially because we don’t have the gossip over coffee or birthday cake for Karen from Finance. We just have our sandbox meetings.
In other words, we don’t have any of the good to compensate for the bad. And there’s been a lot of bad. I’d like to offer you some more examples of real-life conversations during all kinds of meetings that I sent to Audrey in real-time.
Co-worker enters the wrong zoom meeting around 11 o’clock.
“I’m very confused”.
“We weren’t supposed to see you until 1.”
“I’m here for group coaching”
“This is intervision. You’re in the group that has intervision at 1”.
“So I have to leave now?”
“Yes” “Well, then I’m off to group coaching”.
- Fast forward to 1 o’clock -
“What happened this morning that you walked into the wrong meeting?” “I just had so many zoom links that I couldn’t keep up with it anymore. It was very confusing.”
Below you’ll find a picture of what those zoom links look like. TOTAL CHAOS.
Now we’re going back a few weeks in time to our weekly zoom meetings. We were sent documents to prepare, the main item on the agenda was a summary of a quarterly report detailing 3 important points. Our manager asks all of us one by one for comments on these points.
“Do you have anything to say about the 3 points in the report?” “Sorry, I was out getting some water. What did you say?”
“Do you have anything to say about the 3 points in the report?” “What 3 points?”
….
Our manager proceeds to name all 3 points. This takes up an additional 10 minutes.
My last entry gives a good example on one of the reasons why millennial females have a higher risk of burn-out.
Young woman: “I wanted to tell you all that I’m pregnant.”
Male boomer: “When? Because we obviously can’t work without you”.
Almost impressive how someone’s announcement that they’re expecting a child, immediately turns to ‘bUt WhaT aBOut Me?’. It’s great that you’re growing a human inside of you, but we can’t afford to have you take any time off so please work twice as much now and make sure you feel guilty for taking pregnancy leave ok thank you great.
Now that you all have the background information, next week will be dedicated to someone I refer to as the w.o. boomer, our worst offender. This w.o. boomer is the cause of about 40% of my entries and at least one future stress-induced illness. How fun.
I also wanted to update you on my usage of the Nintendo 3ds during meetings. Someone said “What was that blue thing on your screen? I know it’s not your phone but what was it” so long story short, hide your handheld video game devices better than I did.
MIRIAM OUT.
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