Tom at Swans On Tea comments on an article about meetings:
The most common meeting in my experience is the status meeting, where everyone gets together and reports on what they've accomplished. If it's a small group, these are usually fine because you already have familiarity with the tasks. But when you get a large group together, which has diverse tasks and goals, there is impending disaster. Bad meetings I've attended often involve people discussing details that nobody else at the table understands or possibly cares about -- the sort of thing that should happen one-on-one or in a small group, as everyone else sits there, trying not to fall asleep.
The worst case I know of was a BEC project meeting attended by both theorists and experimentalists where a ludicrous amount of time was spent debating the relative merits of making coils out of tubing with a round cross section versus tubing with a square cross section. This led to the splitting of the BEC meetings into separate experimental and theoretical meetings, and became a buzzword with the theory crowd-- whenever an experimental discussion got too thick, they would ask "Does this involve round wire, or square wire?"
Because I have an exam at 8:30 this morning, let's throw this out for an audience participation thread:
What's the most absurdly detailed discussion you've ever been forced to sit through for no good reason?
The excess detail could be technical, bureaucratic, safety-related, or any other category of mind-numbing. All that matters is that it's something you had absolutely no reason to listen to, but you were forced to be at the meeting.
(I'm pretty sure I've told this story before, but again, 8:30 am exam. You're lucky you're not getting cute-baby pictures as filler...)
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Not science related, and I wasn't actually there, but it's become a story in my family.
My grand parents were going to drive down from NY to MD and were delayed by a day because they were arguing over whether a vacuum cleaner worked or not.
"The vacuum cleaner is broken" has become a catch phrase in my family for arguing over an easily tested hypothesis.
I used to work in traffic studies, with a company that consulted with various state DOT's. One state DOT sponsored a training workshop for the latest traffic data management software which lasted a couple of hours -- good idea so far.
I knew we were in trouble early on, when the instructor performed a simple windows operation, and someone from the DOT asked, "How'd you do that?" We ended up wasting half the workshop bringing DOT personnel up to speed on the basics of using windows.
And I do mean 'basics.' I felt bad for the guy doing the workshop, but he was very patient, and eventually we got around to talking about his company's software, for a little while.
Rt
1) Appropriate use of federal IT equipment (no porn, no gambling, no hate sites, no running an online business from your desk, taking more than 30 minutes and including Power Point slides)
2) Federal IT Security for Dummies (do not write your password on a post it that says "password" and stick on your monitor, no dowloading of music or movies to your work computer, no leaving the lap top lying around in random unsecured places, at least 30 minutes with Power Point slides and stupid questions)
3) How to Survive a Chemical, Biological, or Radiological Attack on Our Nations Capital (Bring you emergency kit containing a glow stick, a gallon jug of water, and you EscapeHood which will give you 15 minutes of clean air and move to the center of the building, be prepared to hang out for 3 to 5 days, 1 hour including Power Point slides of stupid paranoid questions)
I was once involved in a satellite project in which our instrument included a tank of isobutane gas for a proportional counter. The tank was certified as being safe for a rocket launch. Needless to say, that was not sufficient to satisfy Department of Transportation regulations on the transport of flammable gases, so in order to deliver our instrument we had to get an exemption from the DOT. The application had been submitted about seven months before the delivery date, which should have been plenty of time for DOT to review it. Unfortunately, they happened to receive the application during the Republican-engineered government shutdown of 1995.
As the delivery date approached, we still did not have the DOT exemption in hand, so our daily status meetings featured increasingly urgent action items for one of our engineers to follow up with DOT. We came within 36 hours of having to punt our delivery date for no other reason than the lack of a DOT exemption, but it finally arrived either Thursday or Friday before the delivery date on the following Monday.
How to Survive a Chemical, Biological, or Radiological Attack on Our Nations Capital
Kate, are/were you based in DC? If not, then you win the thread.
I am DC based and I am about a 1.5 from the Capitol Complex. It was the post 9/11 version of duck and cover, and probably would be about as effective. People started talking about whether or not they needed to stockpile food in their desks.
I can't think of a specific example, but I have beenm on projects where meetings often degenerated into "terranecrohipposadism" or "flogging the ground where a dead horse used to be".
A three piece human intraocular lens (cataract replacement) was a colorless Plexiglas lentil with two curved strands of surgical blue polypropylene suture, haptics, inserted at opposite ends of its edge to provide a mild compression fit within the natural collagen bag suspended beind your pupil.
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When one-piece IOLS wholly milled from Plexiglas were shown to be vastly better engineering and 30% higher manufacturing yield, the company wanted to make those haptics blue, too.
More than six months of interdepartmental intensive, focused meetings debated a life-and-death corporate question: How blue should the one piece haptics be? Agreement was finally reached: The same blue as polypro suture.
Punchline One: How is "blue" measured? Nobody in suits knew, and they weren't about to hose off some in-house technical staff to ask. More meetings, with consultants (purportedly including a hilarious Pantone color chip debate). A=(epsilon)bc for a transparent medium.
Punchline Two: Look at a modern one-piece IOL. Its haptics, like the lens itself, are colorless. Polypro haptics were blue because commercial polypro suture was colored blue - to be visible against blood-red tissue inside a surgical wound. The optical path of the eye, cornea to retina, is bloodless.
I think one of the things that drove me out of experimental HEP and into theory was sitting through an hour-long meeting about the precise definitions of "fudge factor", "correction factor", and "k-factor" and which was appropriate in a particular context.
Not exactly a round v. square wire problem, but boring presentation in general just kill me.
At a rather large conference in my field (which emphasizes visual art and presentations among other things), a competitor gave a half hour long talk about some new technique they were using. Unfortunately he used PowerPoint, which is strongly discouraged by the very nature of the field we are in. And despite his being of the artist persuasion, the first 25 minutes of his presentation about his new art technique was entirely bullet point text which he proceeded to read aloud, verbatim, from the screen.
To his credit, once he got done with that awful awful part of the presentation, he then opened up some software interface and in his last 5 or so minutes, did an awesome demonstration of the stuff he had just bored us all to tears with.
I work for a software company and once sat through a meeting with marketing types in which they debated for thirty minutes the merits of calling a new edition of our software "Software Name (University Edition)" vs "Software Name -- University Edition".
This one.
(just kidding) :)
Ground loops.
In my youth, I would always pick through the neighbor's trash on the way home from school looking for radio tubes and other treasures.
One day I found an odd piece of lead with what looked like letters along one edge. I made the mistake of asking my dad what it was at dinner that night and instead of just telling me it was a slug from a printing press, he went into excruciating detail about linotype machines, the processes used to assemble the slug, and how it was used. Dinner went on for HOURS. Even my mother was rolling her eyes.
From that day to this, whenever the possibility of an overly detailed explanation is anticipated, we shout linotype and crack up.
At an all company meeting, the CEO of the place I was working for managed to spend 3 min (including slides) explaining why excessively long voicemail greetings should be avoided (answer: they waste people's time).
On the stability of optics mounts. It was a several hour discussion involving the number of points of contact, flatness of surfaces, temperature fluctuations and differential thermal expansions, air currents and torque, and the longest topic of all, whether adding glue (epoxy, Torr Seal, super glue, thermal epoxy, etc.) aids in said stability.
Sounds like the "bikeshed" argument. I was once witness to an hour discussion (plus several email threads) about whether or not a piece of software should increment its version number (which by convention was referred to as one of an alphabetical set of vegetable names) or add an underscore and a suffix ("_phy") to the current version. "Phy" for physics. The suffix did nothing but set it apart from the previous version, which is exactly the same thing that incrementing the version number would do. Wouldn't you know it, "_phy" won, and eventually got a brother suffix too. Sometime this fall, we may finally move on to the next vegetable.
Spending 3.5 hours of my 4 hour work day discussing what we should call sections of an online system that was supposed to educate students, lessons or projects, oh and the system wasn't built and wasn't about to be built for several months if not more than a year or more. On top of it, only two people in the room of 6 had any say in the matter, the rest of us were there to look pretty or something.
I once led a briefing describing how we complied with NSA regulations when securing cryptographic equipment at an unmanned site. Pre-PowerPoint, I had to use overheads in a dimly lit briefing room I thought I was magnificent, but Major General Colin Powell, Commander of V Corps wasn't impressed. I'm told he nodded off.
I admit to some schadenfreude when we passed the subsequent inspection and the HQ was reprimanded for their security lapses.
The yearly Nuclear Biological Chemical Warfare briefings were brutal, the exercises painful. Trying to type on an ancient teletype console wearing a chemical warfare suit and gas mask was just stupid.
Generically and recurrent: If you ever hear old school RF engineers argue about capacitor and inductor types, you will want to stab your eyes out. Or their eyes out.
Specifically and never again: One of our most senior advisory engineers once got a real wedgie over the precise definitions of line widths and line weights and other such fiddly details of our AutoCAD drawings-- and let me stress, this wasn't the important part of the drawings, not in the engineering models, per se, but the outline forms of the tables, the fonts, the leaders, and whatnot in paperspace. Dull, dry, impossible tedia made worse by the vile, hateful, pernicious interactions between AutoCAD, various printer drivers, and various printers.
There were three or four of us that were just plagued by this guy. We made a game attempt to get everything set up the way he wanted, then concluded that it was just impossible to have every printer in the building respond in the fashion he wanted; hell, we tried for months and couldn't even get one printer to reliably respond the way he wanted it to for all four of us.
And he would not let go of this.
"But what if the guys on the production floor try to print this out and they can't read the table?"
"Then they can bring it up on-screen, where it always looks fine."
"But what if they don't have AutoCAD on their screens?"
"Then they won't be trying to print it out from AutoCAD, will they? They'll print it out from the officially governing PDF flat text on archive, where it always looks fine."
"But what if--"
"THEN I WILL PRINT IT OUT FOR THEM AND HAND CARRY IT DOWN TO THEM!"
"But what if they can't find you?"
(He always was deaf to sarcasm.)
We wasted more than one actual meeting on this before we all decided to pocket veto the subject, stop responding to meeting invites and basically stop responding to e-mails and conversations about it.
Among the four of us, we still refer to line weights as a watchword for counter-productive obsessive-compulsive non-sense.