Floating Some Ideas
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I count myself pretty fortunate that these days I don't have to spend hardly any time at all in business meetings.
As a contractor, I learned that's the benefit of being an unknown quantity in a large organization or a known quantity in a small one. Either you stay under the meeting radar or the company is agile enough to only meet when necessary, free of the tension of spans-and-layers of organization hierarchy.
That hasn't always been the case though. There have been days where I had to reserve time on the work calendar as OOO (out of the office) in order to actually just get some real honest-to-goodness, this-is-what-you-pay-me-for, work done.
The distractedness of living in what I lovingly call "meeting hell", led me to generate these mental games of sorts, to keep my spirits up and my mind occupied.
One of them was:
The Business Lexicon - Bullshit Jargon Virtual Drinking Game
You know those tick marks people mark on walls when they are stuck in medieval prisons? Four vertical lines and a diagonal grouped in fives...
Good. You will need that skill..
It's a simple game, here's how you play it. On your meeting notepad, simply make a tick mark on the sheet somewhere every time someone utters a cringeworthy Dilbert-esque empty-speak piece of B.S. Jargon. One tick mark for every:
Synergy
Circle Back
Put a Pin it It
Informatics
Mindshare
Reconceptualize
..any word mashup built from inappropriate 'e'-prefixes, like e-tailers
You get it. It's a little subjective, like Scrabble.
Then, on another part of your notes, make a tick mark every time someone uses some sort of inside-baseball business jargon in a clear and effective way to convey the idea.
At the end of the meeting, count your tick marks. Treat each B.S. Jargon tick mark like it was a shot of tequila (or rum or whatever you like). Treat the other like a shot of expresso. Do the over under and see how your caffeine or alcohol intake would have impacted your health..
Roughly 14 shots of tequila / vodka / appropriately strong rum can bring your BAC to .4%, in a 150lb human. This is considered potentially fatal, though realistically your body would activate it's "What the hell are you doing?" defensive measures and you'd have to work at actually keeping that quantity of booze down.
On the other end of the spectrum, it can take up to about 100-150 shots of expresso before the grim reaper comes looking for your vibrating body.
A side-effect (feature) of this little game is that when you have your inevitable "meeting-with-the-Bobs", ala Office Space and someone asks you about meeting effectiveness, you have a glanceable metric (shot) for a proper performance analysis (shot) concerning the cost-to-labor benefit (shot) of...err..hrmm.. ZZZzzzzzzZzzzZ
*drool*
