Stuck in a meeting with six Germans

I am stuck in a meeting with 6 Germans... this meeting has started at 9am this morning, and is still going on. The content of what has been discussed, could easily have been covered within an hour... why are business meetings with Germans always so tiring because 80% of what is said is so irrelevant??

What I'd like to know is: Are any of them smoking?

hahhahahahahhahahahahahhahahahah!

I mean...

hahahhahahahhaahahahhahahhahahahahahahahahhahahhahahahahahahahahahaha!

I hate meetings here!

Because managers need to do something you know!!

Three of them smoke

If you're lucky to be the facilitator - get them to type up the meeting minutes next time. They'll never open their mouths again (lol)

Sparty's offline! Free at last?

_{... or under the conference table, gasping for breath?}

Don't use lifts, aircraft or escalators for a few days because you used up all your luck for this week.

I used to be in a department with marathon meetings, and it's amazing the change you can bring about by instilling a bit of discipline. Insist on an agenda and meeting minutes. All concurrent meetings will start by going through the previous meeting's minutes with the responsible party giving a quick update on the status of each item in it. Any discussions of subjects that don't involve the entire group are stymied and a note is made in the minutes of the need for a later meeting of the involved people to discuss the irrelevant subject. When followed properly, most meetings can be wrapped up in two hours tops and can even seem like productive time spent.

I have experienced that a couple of times! Usually my ex boss called at 17 pm on a friday, wanting to have a meeting! Jerk!

Works wonders. Also agree on rules (no mobiles, no e-mail during meeting). When discussions go OT (down a rat-hole) capture the item on a flip chart sheet "The Parking Lot" & return to agenda.

But this has brought back fond memories of the jackass boss who once sequestered us the entire day with no snacks just to harangue us for hours with a monologue about the dangers of giving him a bad rating in the Viewpoints questionnaire. We all smiled sweetly, if weakly, to his face - and shortly thereafter he was demoted.
Oh, yeah, and that was the meeting in which Matthias and I taught ourselves how to write simultaneously with both hands. Your non-dominant hand will put out mirror script. This is amusing, when you're that kind of bored.

You're not alone, sparty. You're not alone.

woof.

A-fucking-men. It took a sorry bunch of underpaid PhD students in life sciences to come up with that after half a meeting with no form of supervision, I cannot believe there are actually people for which this makes up the majority of their work schedule, i.e. pro meeting monkeys, who have not reached that conclusion yet. It moggles the bind.

I got out of there at 6:40pm. It lasteddddd forever! In the end I just demonstratively closed the lid of my laptop and gave the impression that I was over-ready to leave.

German efficiency is a myth.

I would have stood up after three hours and left unless it was planned to be so long and included a bunch of ass-wipes giving talks about their useless lives. Then I would have called in sick!

Hadn't you realised ? Germans are the world's experts at turning the obvious into a little known science.
Things that were obvious and not worth discussion in primary school, are analysed, described, dissected and disseminated in serious tones, while the listeners nod, scratch beards (if so developed) and above all, add conjecture; instead of saying, "strike a light charlie, give it a bleeding rest !".

Wasting time in meetings has been around since they invented pencils. Look at the Dilbert cartoons. Why is this portrayed in the OP and elsewhere here as a German thing. Typical.

Many cell phones double as a recording device (look, it's probably there - most people don't know this). Figure it out (or simply make a hidden video with your phone) and then post some "choice" MP3s or videos on youtube for us all to fall asleep to.

On other meeting fronts, taking minutes is an art in itself. I was at a company and this English girl, after regularly having taken minutes, demanded that we take turns taking them. The "tablet" got passed to me and I had no idea what to write down.

Meanwhile the EG is watching me do nothing as she fumed in silence, until 20 minutes into the meeting she explodes and gets into this rage about me being sexist and refusing to take minutes. What the heck? I was trying to listen and summarize and then write it all down afterwards, having had to figure out some kind of system on the spot. She thought I was simply boycotting the action when she saw me not writing anything down.

Still don't really know how, and so I just do bullet points. Have cynically done things like writing haiku about different roles Pamela Anderson has played, while making intermittent eye contact with the speaker to feign concentration and interest. Third-person accounts of recent romantic dates are also good for ease in looking serious and attentive.

The only glitch there is that continuously having to look up from your creative masterwork and browse the plainness of the examples of Homo sapiens ssp. germanicus around you, like this:


kind of does a number on trying to maintain that creative vibe.

(for the record: pic is from random google images search using "Hans-Peter". Alternatively, you could use other aesthetic names that just flow off the tongue like "Karl-Friedrich" or "Jens-Hartmut")

Nice specimen, Tomasino.

Couldn't resist checking out the website:

try being in a meeting with 3 Flemish Belgium's and 2 french Belgium's, I am fast loosing the will to live, the french belgiums seem to have lost the ability to speak anything apart from french

LOSING. L-O-S-I-N-G.

It's really not that fucking hard people.

Toytown Germany
Where people can never fucking spell fucking losing.

i never claimed i could spell

Sorry. It's just that one kinda jars my brain every time. It's like being poked in the eye when I read it. Some kinda Pavlov's dog reaction. My speeling sux sometimes as well, it's just the whole "losing" and "loosing" thing I cannot handle.

I prefer the #1 result for "Hans Peter" on an image search:



This one I think is Germanicus Cannibalus Lectorus.

Hey, maybe his will to live was too tight, and he loosed it a bit?

Because Germany has perfected the wasting time aspect to long drawn out boring ass unproductive meetings. Even most of my German colleagues agree. That is except for the ones that think meetings where nothing gets accomplished actually means something.

the Flemish VP has just told the French speakers he is closing the plant down and making nearly 1k of them redundant ( I knew this was in the plan 3 months ago), they are now speaking flemish, well they seem to be able to shout it

That's the nature of meetings in any country with all nationalities. people talk and talk and talk and take 3 times as long as it needs to be.

I am not so sure if he is of that subspecies. Did you see he is a missing person, and may be involved in international spying? (was last seen in Jordan delivering a letter).

My name is Bond. Hans-Peter Bond.

Maybe he's still stuck in a meeting?

I remember working in a bank in Frankfurt where some meetings used to start at 7:00 am, that was a killer. Firstly they would go through the minutes (protokoll) of the last meeting and discuss the outstanding points and then start on the new points. Then someone would start to rehash earlier discussions and basically go around again. In the end I used to just get up and say I have work to do which basically ended the meeting as others decided this was a good point. When they made me start to do the minutes I used to close the items after we had discussed them and if anyone brought it up again I would point out that the item is closed or would they like to start a new item with the action on them! Mind you where I currently am, I have never been to so many meetings. Sad to say though, I have had exactly the same with other nationalities so its not just a German thing.

I wouldn't want to got to a meeting at 5 O'clock on saturday morning either!

hahaha this is the best thread ever! I thankfully don't attend business meetings, but the ones at the Uni are probably even worse, because we all know students involved in any sort of university administration is a complete joke. So try to accomplish something at a meeting with an end goal of something that's next to meaningless anyway.

I've had classmates say "What do you mean you're not going to blabla?"

- Yes, sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but you guys spend 2 hours blethering about this and that which could possibly accomplished in 2 minutes. As such, would you mind telling me later what I missed?

(later) "Yeah, well, we decided that we're not going to have a class party since it doesn't fit to everyone's schedule"

The best is if something hasn't been made completely clear, accounting for every possible scenario:

"But what if there's a storm the night before the exam, which knocks a tree over, thereby knocking out powerlines to the building, and simultaneously maiming the professor? What will happen then?" This of course was already the 15th variation on the theme.

Ever heard of the words "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it (and if you try that again I'll punch you in the mouth just for wasting air-time)"?

Wow, Toytown Germany is a great place to let off some steam amongst people who understand. I feel better.

has anyone here had to fasciliate such meetings? i'm the token english native speaker & now my boss wants me to do this for our architecture meetings, which i am glad to take part in, but they were canceled last year because they became unproductive.

otherwise we rotate, the system of which is archaic and no one seems to "get" it. my boss does not want to do it with this one because then whoever is taking the minutes (insert, key architect) will not be able to participate in the decision making and no one wants that, right?

Excellent!!! Love the Hans-Peter google pic search.
That is so true. In my company about 99% of what I have heard in meetings has been irrelevant to me.
Ever tried playing "bullshit bingo"?, thats great in German.
My boss uses the word "Umorganisation" about 50 times per meeting.
Once someone said "De-bottlenecking", I am english and don't even know what that is supposed to mean.

Look, like any normal person I like to slag off the natives of this country.

But I really don't think this is a German phenomenon. In fact, I've found German colleagues to be very responsive to positive leadership in meetings. Although, left to their own devices they do tend to make meetings an exquisite torture.

But when I worked in England, way back in the days when pagers were popular, I would get colleagues to page me half-way through meetings. I could then leave looking at my pager and acting as if something urgent had cropped up.

More recently I've had to go to the US for three and five day meetings. The participants comprised an international bunch, with only one token German who hadn't lived here for decades. The meetings were utterly terrible. I'd swap two of your German meetings for one of those.

Sparty, if you can, I would try to influence the meetings to be more efficient. Germans tend to like initiative-taking assertive leadership from foreigners.*

TPWNN

_{*This actually wasn't a snide historical quip, although feel free to take it that way if you wish.}

Meetings, where you take minutes and waste hours.

Actually this meeting is taking place from Monday through Friday this week. I am so sick of it! My escape for today was that I had a lucky position of being able to turn away my laptop screen from others and watch some silly youtube video's