This Is What's Wrong With Business Communication Today

It's been a rough few weeks at work, with a major project taking over many of our lives. I don't even know how many dinners I ate at the office. Too many. But we should be out of the woods at this point, and I hope to avoid similar efforts in the future.

I do have one observation from this whole experience, related to poor business communication.

In a meeting earlier this week, one participant suddenly started handing out chocolate bars. In the disarray that followed as everyone reached for the candy, another guy stated, only partially tongue-in-cheek: "I didn't know you'd be implementing a food distribution program."

This would be otherwise known -- to normal people -- as "handing out snacks."

Airport Rage

I am currently trapped at the Minneapolis Airport, on my way home from a week in Banff for a business meeting.

I am irate.

Seven years ago, I missed my friend Dave's WEDDING because of Northwest Airlines. Inexplicably, my flight (from Newark, NJ, to Orange County, CA, by way of Minneapolis) was canceled due to "weather," when all other flights out of Newark Airport seemed to be taking off just fine. (Weather, my ass.) Of course, they kept us sitting on the runway for 3 hours, so by the time they released us from our imprisonment there were no more flights out that DAY. I left early the next morning and only made it for the reception. I swore to never fly Northwest again.

For my business trip to Banff, I had to decide between a 6am departure time out of Dulles, or taking Northwest through Minnesota. I should have known better, but I made the wrong choice. The flight here from the Calgary-Banff Airport was so turbulent that I seriously considered the possibility of driving the second leg of my trip home, from Minnesota to DC. At one point, I realized I didn't even care if the plane went down, because my emotional/mental/digestive misery would end. I spent the last half hour of the flight in a cold sweat. We finally landed and I made my way to the next gate.

The only food available is a Dairy Queen with questionable sanitation standards (evidenced by the large brown puddle on the customer side of the counter ... and it's not raining). The food looked dubious, so I got a small peanut butter cup blizzard, which turned out to be a heath bar blizzard. Whatever. I then tried to find an outlet for my laptop. The first one I tried was dead. The second one I tried was dead. The third one I tried was dead. Now I'm sitting in a hallway against a wall by one of the few working outlets as those elderly-transport carts whiz past me. I just ate the weird trail mix from the depressing "snack box" I had to buy on the first leg of the flight.

My cell phone has one tick of power left on it, and my charger is packed in my checked luggage.

Oh, and my flight is delayed indefinitely.

WTF? I just want to go home.

Company Picnic

Last week, my office held its annual picnic at an offsite location featuring games, music, line dancing lessons (!), rock-wall climbing, and assorted odd snacks. Initially, I looked for the old standby, hot dogs, but finding none, I picked up some chicken strips. At the first bite, I knew I'd made a mistake. I spit the limp, damp bite of chicken into a napkin, rinsed my mouth with some Amstel, and hit up the snack line once again. This time, I chose the mini corn dogs -- believe it or not, the least dubious snack there. They were cold, and oddly sweet, but edible.

I wandered up to the midway with some colleagues, won a stuffed parrot and consumed a funnel cake and half an ice cream cone. I hit the picture booth with a random colleague and headed back to the picnic patio, the only place alcohol was allowed. There I found my colleague Tammy, who was complaining about the lack of hot dogs amid the snack offerings. She told me she'd actually seen a bunch of hot dogs and had asked for one, but she'd been turned away. "These are for the hot-dog-eating contest," she was told. No matter what she said, they wouldn't hand one over.

Tammy said she was considering entering the hot-dog-eating contest and eating just one hot dog, perhaps requesting some mustard and sauerkraut before the start of the event. Once she'd eaten a single dog, she'd throw in the towel. She decided against it, but several other colleagues took the challenge and signed up, their type-A competitive juices clearly flowing. And it wasn't about the prize itself -- a mere $100. It was about winning, pure and simple.

The contest was about to begin, so we found good spots and settled in for the five-minute event, an orgy of encased-meat consumption. Some competitors dunked their buns in cups of water, taking a page from world-class hot-dog-eating champions (see "How to Win a Hot Dog Eating Contest"). Others just doggedly bit and chewed, bit and chewed.

When it ended, the colleague most-well-known for his cutthroat competitive tendencies had won. Another colleague ran to the portapotties to vomit. The organizers offered up the leftover hot dogs to the spectators.

NOBODY took one. Tammy and I agreed we didn't want a hot dog anymore.

Maybe not ever.

The Mogwai Are Restless

I had a terrible week last week with the Mogwai client. We spent about 16 hours in "writing meetings" during which no writing took place. Instead, one of the head Mogwais pontificated on his Very Bad Ideas for hours at a time.

At one point, he said the following: "The problem is, we have bears and elephants. We need to have all elephants." Knowing his idea was a poor one, I followed up with, "but how can you turn bears into elephants?" And he replied, to my utter dismay: "EXACTLY!"

*weeping*

Because no writing took place in the writing meetings, the writing had to take place this weekend. For this, I am resentful. But I didn't bear the brunt of it -- I just did the edit. Another colleague had to write the first draft. It was his birthday yesterday.

What kind of life is this?

I need to get off this project.

Client Work: In Support of Mogwai

I never talk about work on here because I think it's generally a boring topic, and it also seems like a great way to get fired. But I've recently started working on a project that is having some assorted "challenges," and as a result, the team I'm working with has instituted a number of hard-and-fast rules. The team was informed of these rules during an anti-motivational meeting in which the manager's finger pointed at us all numerous times. (Thankfully, it was quite uncharacteristic of my experiences to date in this particular career.)

I don't remember all the rules verbatim, but I'll try to give you an idea of them here.

• This task and no other must be a priority
• Do not announce yourself on conference calls
• Do not allow too many of your team members to attend the same meeting
• The client may joke around with you, but you do NOT joke around with the client
  
• Keep it out of bright light
• Never get it wet
• Never, ever, ever feed it after midnight