Lets meet on that...

I twittered a little bit ago: "My day at work: Email, Meeting, Meeting, Email, Lunch, Email, Meeting, Meeting, Meeting, Email." This would not be a typical day for me. Several odd things would be 1. The sheer amount of email I have received over the past 2 days, 2. The number of meetings I had today and 3. I actually took time for lunch and didn't just sit at my desk and answer emails.

After I tweeted this though I got to thinking about my view of meetings. One of my first "real" jobs was video taping meetings for Microsoft employees who were too busy doing other things to come and sit in a meeting and answer email. So I got paid (what was to me then) an insane amount of money to stay awake and look highly technical behind a video camera. I got to tape Bill Gates and Steve Balmer among other MS bigwigs. It was an interesting job for an early college student to have. Hours were pretty bad though.

This was pretty much my first experience with meetings. I came to understand why people dreaded them. The phrase "Death by Powerpoint" was not thrown about casually. (Worst. Meeting. Ever: 120+ Powerpoint slides, COVERED in C++ code. Hours of boredom) However, I came to realize that the higher up you were the more time you spent in meetings. If you were a lowly cog in the wheels you never had meetings, no those were for important people.

As much as something like this: "Yeah, I've got a few minutes before my lunch meeting. I got out a bit early from my 3hour morning meeting. And I can't meet after lunch because I have a 1 o'clock and a 3:30 scheduled." might sound like some kind of horrific it is in fact a label of how important you are in a company. My boss at OC (The Executive Vice President) handles his life of emails, report generating, and meetings with much more humility than that, but you get what I am trying to say.

So when I said I had a handful of meetings today it kind of made me excited. It was more than just "meeting someone to fix their desktop after lunch" it was meetings that had real and solid purpose(s). It's the meetings like this that make me realize how glad I am that I don't possess the skills needed to potentially take over my bosses job some day. I'm great where I am thanks. Over a great team of people and helping to guide OC into the future of technology. I'm happy here thanks, with a handful of meetings thrown in occasionally, lots of email, while still being able to get my hands dirty helping to fix something. I think perhaps I've found a perfect job.

~B.