If we all put our heads together.

The only thing that makes my ass itch more than regular meetings are “brainstorming meetings." Dude, I hate brainstorming meetings. Mostly because I am pretty sure I could come up with perfectly great ideas ALL BY MYSELF and save a hell of a lot of time sitting around a table gently explaining them to others, watching them ponder them, listening to them say I’m wrong, and then, eventually, after five hours and twenty-three cookies later, presenting my own ideas back to me as if they had just come up with them. This is what's called "teamwork."

I could give a crap about teamwork, frankly. For several years of my corporate life, during big ginormous planning meetings, I would volunteer to be the “Scribe,” which is teamwork speak for “the person with the giant Sharpie and huge pad of paper on an easel." No one else ever wanted to be the Scribe, because you have to stand up. And it’s more obvious that you’re only there for the cookies when you keep leaving the easel to grab another one. But mostly it’s because you have to stand up. Whereas my "teammates" saw the Scribe as someone who had to listen to everyone else and write down their group thoughts, I saw it as The Person Who Gets the Sharpie and Doesn’t Have to Listen At All. It was rather wonderful standing in front of a group of 12 people waxing poetic about customer service intiatives and smacking hotel baked goods while I was writing down my own personal and private thoughts without their permission. And, at the end of the day, it had exactly the same result as actually discussing it with them, we used the ideas I wanted to afterall.

Nowadays, I work for a family-owned much smaller organization. We don't waste time or paper, and I'm good with that. In honor of those extra good times with extra big paper, the theme for today’s Half-Assed Haiku Thursday shall be: Meetings.

Forbidden words: Post-it, Tony Robbins.

Here’s mine.

Think out of the box!
We will greenlight everything!
Except that. It’s dumb.

Happy Thursday, Internet.