For the benefit of the visiting firemen...

Two or three times a year my boss calls together the members of his "distributed" team of "direct reports" (dontcha love the way I try to distance myself from The Corporate World by scare-quoting routine terms?) for a couple of days of meetings to talk about "what we did last year, and what worked, and what didn't, and what we mean to do in the months upcoming." One of the things we never do in these meetings is review "So, did we actually DO any of the things we said we would last year?" No matter - on the one hand, no one takes it terribly seriously as a career event. On the other hand, we all take it somewhat seriously because if we can make things work better, not only does our day-to-day existence become less painful, but the chances of our efforts contributing to the success of the organization are greater, and if we're seen to contribute to the organization's success, well then our chances of having the option of whether to continue working there are enhanced. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the things we'll tell ourselves for a buck.

So we sat there from 0900 to about 1830 (six-thirty peeyem for you civilians), with a few pee breaks, and a few email breaks (The Boss forbids laptop use in meetings, a stricture with which I heartily concur), and a little time off for byplay about lunch - apparently the place where he'd planned to send out for sandwiches was either closed for the holiday or lacking phone serivce because of the ice storm) - and then time to actually nosh lunch, and time for Himself to be on a Very Important Concall for 90 minutes... wait, where was I, where were we?

I dunno. Many of the folks cooped up with me in that room were enjoying their first outing in this particular event at this particular company; a few others have been through almost as many of them as I have (I predate my Boss in this particular organization and event). They were very interested, and did well presenting their slides for their particular projects. I'd almost say a couple of them were "cute" except that I suspect it would be disrespectful to speak thus of a 40-year old manager with 15 years experience in the field. So they weren't cute; but it was bubbly to watch them.

I'm way too old for this shit.