My Approximated Running Meeting Diary

10:00 AM: We gather. As a refresher, the members of the team are:
Sorro
Forro
Jorge Posada
Alex Rodriguez
Derek Jeter
Robinson Cano
Jason Giambi.
Giambi is out this week in another office. We're actually getting more and more on time, which is a HUGE deal for this group. We have a couple of the latest people in the world on our team.
10:10 AM: Forro foolishly walked into a trap. We've got a player in the minors (let's call him Phil Hughes) who Jeter is really pushing to bring up to the big leagues. Forro and I think that he's good, but we've got to hold on on it and let him earn his way up rather than just saying "there you go." Posada, in all his infinite yes-mannity, is going along with whatever Jeter says because Jeter said it. "Well, you're the team captain, so I'm going to plant my lips firmly on your rear end and it will take the Jaws of Life to remove them." Meanwhile, Cano is having a conversation on his phone. Because, you know, it's not like he should be actively engaged in our meeting or anything.
10:20 AM: Cano decides that his phone call is more important than everything else that we need to discuss in our meeting and he does this by putting the employee he was talking with on speakerphone and proceeding to hash out the issue of "what do we do, we have competitors!" with the help of the entire management team. It's at precisely this point I gave up on trying to stear the meeting in any sort of productive direction and instead I did some work and blogged.
11:15 AM: A-Rod decides to get our lawyer on the phone to hash out some more of this having competitors issue. Seriously, you'd think we were a monopoly or something. At any rate, he gets her on the phone and proceeds to give her the long and the short of the conversation (his words), which meant, of course, the long of the conversation along with some commentary, heresay, and conjecture.
11:30 AM: After a 15 minute (billable) conversation, we hang up with the lawyer, Cano calls back the hibbity-dibbity employee, and I finalize a trade in my fantasy football league. I think that the most productive thing that's happened so far in this meeting is indeed the finalization of that trade.
12:20 PM: We finally finish with all of this ridiculous time wastage and get back to business. At this point, we get back to the agenda and get back to Posada pretending that he's actually a valuable member of the team. He shows this value by saying that he will "help people with this" and/or regurgitating things that we talked about months ago and presenting them as fresh ideas that he somehow came up with.
12:40 PM: Posada pulls a rabbit out of his hat! He is talking about how some of his people are auditing things that my people should be auditing in a ridiculous attempt to get a leg up on me. I counter with the fact that we had a meeting 2 months ago wherein I talked specifically about that issue and he and his people said straight up that they had to audit that. They get first crack at the documents so I said that they could and we all told my people not to re-audit what his people were auditing. His parting line after I told him this? "Well, it would be good to go over that again with your people." What I wish I could have said? "How about you shut your big yapper!"
1:10 PM: We get out, and only about an hour late. Even though we've had longer meetings, time-wise, I can't think of any single meeting that has been as annoying as this one was. I think the reason is because we actually had good meetings there for a while.