Pointless

Once a week we have to meet to discuss the status of IT’s big project to get several buttloads (metric) of irrelevant, obsolete traffic data entered from old report printouts into the database. These meetings are scheduled for an hour each, but thank God, they rarely go longer than twenty minutes, unless somebody senior to the project lead is there, or unless some foolhardy soul asks a question.

If someone senior to the project lead is there, he – that’s Coworker-You-Idiot, for those of you keeping score at home – drags the meeting out, presumably on the theory if a productive meeting is a long meeting, so by extension must a long meeting be a productive one. That’s called logic! Fortunately, people senior to C-Y-I never seem to attend more than once.

Then there’s the one guy who always asks questions when he comes to the meetings. It doesn’t make any difference what he asks: C-Y-I invariably answers with several minutes’ worth of explanation of why data in a digital format is better than data on paper. I don’t think most of us need to have this explained to us. Actually, I don’t think any of us need to have this explained to us. C-Y-I just goes ahead and explains it anyway, I guess because he’s so proud of having managed to grasp the concept himself – probably something of a rare sensation for him.

In fact, I also suspect C-Y-I cherishes the notion that Question Guy may actually be stupider than himself – also probably not an experience with which he is overly familiar. On the day I showed C-Y-I and Question Guy how to set up formulas in Excel (did I mention these guys work in IT?), C-Y-I asked me to sit with Question Guy for a morning and train him on how to 10-key. You could tell Question Guy was stung.

Whether you want to see them or not, here are sample minutes from a typical meeting.

Standard Report Conversion Project Meeting
10:30 – 11:30am
Conference Room A

Attendees: C-Y-I, Question Guy, One of the Three IT Employees Who Actually Know How to Use a Computer, Jason, Elizabeth

• Elizabeth has finished entering 1958 data and will work on 1954 next.
-----o C-Y-I has set up a template in Excel for Elizabeth to type numbers into

• Jason is currently working on 1953
-----o No hurry

• As we move further back in time, much of the data is incomplete, especially during the war years
-----o Question Guy asks what happened to the missing data
------------ C-Y-I takes several minutes to explain the benefits of having the data in electronic format
------------------• Elizabeth wonders if part of her skirt can be torn off to form a makeshift gag

• 1940s and 1930s data does not follow a standard format, so nobody will be able to create a template. It will have to be typed straight into Excel.
-----o If anybody wants to experiment with setting up a template anyway, they can. There’s no time constraint
-----o C-Y-I takes a few minutes to reiterate that 10-keying is faster and more accurate than optical recognition software
------------ Nobody ever said it wasn’t

• C-Y-I and OTITEWAKHUC are still doing QC, and will continue to do so until project is completed. No rush

• Traffic data was not broken up into Rural vs. Urban until 1969
-----o Elizabeth suggests that perhaps this is because Texas was comprised entirely of ranches prior to 1969
------------ C-Y-I takes several minutes to set this misconception straight
------------------• Elizabeth needs to learn to keep her damn mouth shut

• No rush, because we’ve already finished entering all the critical data for all the critical years (“critical” here meaning “having any possible relevance whatsoever”) months ago, and the rest of this is just stupid busywork which will be ongoing for years

• This meeting has been entirely pointless