Mike Causey

The Creature That Walks Among You

Do you ever have the urge to scream at a staff meeting? Welcome to the club! Meetings in many offices are getting out of hand and Senior Correspondent Mike Caus...

Federal News Network Staff

July 15, 2008 4:00 am

4 min read

Whether you work at the Pentagon, an IRS office in Austin, or a Social Security outpost in Seattle you should be able to identify the following creature, which may exhibit one of more of the following:

wear two hearing aids, posses a giant ego, carry a can of air freshner, have a cherished photo of someone with a large head, nurture a love – or fear – of buzz words, be armed with a can of air freshener, have the mental detachment to play word bingo without cards, have the ability to sleep standing up, or have the inability to distinguish tentacles from testicles.

Give up?

Of course you do.

No sane person could identify with such a creature. And yet the creature walks among you…

That composite picture – with many variations – could be used in a line up to pick out long-suffering feds, both rank-and-file and top management, who increasingly find their time taken up by meetings. It was the subject of yesterday’s column about the growing trend in government and corporate bureaucracies to have meetings about little, or often, nothing.

We asked for real life examples of meetings you have survived. And you came through. Here goes:

We had an Assistant Office Director who wore 2 hearing aids. You could tell how important the meeting was by the length of time he listened before reaching back and turning off his hearing aids. We could tell he was turning them off because he would begin to nod off five minutes after putting his hands on them. We use to bet on how long it would be before he would turn them off.
…Another executive would coin new phrases but had a habit of confusing similar sounding words. He once tried to illustrate how mired the project would become by saying; “It would be like getting bound up by the testicles of an octopus.” No one ever forgot that phrase. Robert Aune, Social Security Administration retired.

As to favorite buzz words, Brian from Interior has these favorites:

That being said… please stay on point… the proposed solution is another way of polishing (the foreign object) in the punchbowl, and a drum roll please, the insufferable “C’mon, let’s all think out of the box on this one.”
An Archives employee says his boss has two favorite buzz phrases: “cradle to grave” and “redlight, greenlight” that pretty much covers everything.

Sometimes controlled hysteria pays off as in this offering from Rita who says:

At one staff meeting the boss was seated in an executive chair. The staff gathered around in a semi-circle in more uncomfortable chairs while the boss spoke in very somber terms. I was distracted by a photo on the table behind his desk. One of the people in it had an unusually large noggin which reminded me of a Macy’s parade balloon. Trying not to laugh made it worse. Soon the whole staff was laughing without knowing why. This a very definite “don’t” if trying to star at a meeting.
There is a variation to Bingo using cards with buzzwords. You cross it out every time one is used and the first player to get a vertical, horizontal or diagonal line across the card wins. It’s not a good idea to jump up in the meeting and yell BINGO! just because your bossed used the word “parameters” and you won. It does make you more attentive to what’s said, however. At a previous job, before the feds, I used to have a can of air freshener that I made a label that read “BS Repellent”. If someone gave us a load of crap at a staff meeting I would start to spray the air. Stan the Man.

Coming up, more harrowing tales of meetings and some suggestions on how to shorten them, avoid them or (in the name of humanity) sabotage them.

Nearly Useless Factoid

From the good folks at the National Geographic comes this tidbit: “the fastest muscles known lie within the throats of songbirds, according to new research on how birds vibrate their vocal cords.” Okay, but how fast are they? They’re moving those muscles “a hundred times faster than a blink of the human eye.” Good. Now I have a good excuse to close my eyes while listening to birds sing – can’t see it anyway.

To reach me: mcausey@federalnewsradio.com