I am lucky to be involved in several conference calls every week (that may have been said with my tongue firmly in my cheek) and whilst they are viewed as helpful to the running of a successful business I cannot help but think that most of the people would rather be doing something else. I have just spent an hour on a call where I am sure one of the participants was having a haircut and another was walking his dog, I managed to eat my way through a packet of American Hard Gums so had to add a few slow responses hidden behind a thoughtful Hmm. Do you get involved in these types of calls and do you have a confession
All the time... Once did one to the US whilst sat on a pedallo in the Adriatic Most often I put it on speaker phone, press mute and come on here...
I only go on mute so that they don't hear the screaming inside my mind that one day will end in my blurting out many words, most of them starting with a c or an f and ending with an ing. I once had a long and heated argument with a 'specialist' brought in to make meetings more efficient - my hypothesis that the real skill in making a meeting efficient is to avoid having one in the first place was not met with the open arms and embracing attitude you might think. Having said that though, a conference call is a good excuse to leave most situations in work - including other conference calls!
On average I spend around 10 hours per week on them, I usually do other things when ever possible, was once asked a question and I was in the bog taking a dump lol, the funniest was when I went fir a pee and forgot to mute my phone, the host asked what the noise was....everyone burst out laughing as it was obvious but no one owned up.....t'was me Generally they are boring as he'll and everyone does emails while listening to the boring stuff, At least that's how it is where I work
Bah, meeting schmeetings! I hate them, if everybody knew what they were doing and was good at it then meetings wouldn't be needed so often, they drive me bananas. We've had a new chief engineer who has decided we should have a daily meeting...why?! We've never had any before, we all know what we are doing and now he just stands there, talks Marmite and wastes half an hour of time when i and the other engineers could be doing what we are actually paid to do...fix stuff!
