Funny "meeting speak cheat sheet"

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Nice job un-plumping.

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“Sounds good to me” = I have no idea what you’re saying

In my case specifically: “I have no idea what you’re saying because I haven’t been listening.”

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My favourite is definitely:

“Let’s get some data on that” = I’m pretty sure you’re wrong

But that’s not just for meetings. That’s for everything.

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That stock photo is so unfortunate. I’ve sat through my share of meetings, but I’ve never seen such an orgy of high-fiving.

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I’m happy with my “intent focus” meeting style. Anyone who would rather I didn’t seem to be paying absolute attention so they could slip up or dither or otherwise even begin to appear to waste my time are largely disappointed.

I think we can find consensus best by agreeing to kill the holdouts, particularly if lunch is pending.

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I’m afraid that when I ran some of these up a flagpole, nobody saluted.
(One of the many convoluted phrases that translates as “I am going to dismiss this, but I’m not going to be seen to dismiss it.”

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My boss used to have one of these on her wall, along with the “six phases of a project”. Hers included “thank you for your contribution” which translated as “f**k you”. Actually it had a lot of phrases that ended with that translation, come to think of it.

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On conference calls it seems like this always happens:

Meeting organizer: “What do you think, Larry?..Larry?..Did Larry drop off?”

Larry: “I’m sorry, my phone was on mute. Can you repeat the question?”

“My phone was on mute” = I wasn’t paying attention.

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I read the 10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings article, and everything was going great until I got to the one where I’m supposed to repeat whatever the engineer just said.

I am the engineer.

I guess I could just repeat myself. After all I’m the engineer and have little ability to interact with others.

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“I’ll get back to you on that.” = “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Or,

“…silence…” = “LOLwut? insert pear”

Non-video conferencing is bogus. Tech has made old office meeting tropes tropey.

Next?

“How does this align with our core values?” = This sounds like a terrible thing to do to whomever.


Probably the “smartest” looking thing to do for a meeting is to refuse to attend any meetings that don’t have agendas. :persevere: The next thing is to make sure that agreed-upon tasks get assigned with due dates and follow ups scheduled.

I once had a boss who would just invite me to meetings knowing that I would basically hold the meeting on whatever was asked for on the fly. I got dragged into so many meetings where no one knew why we were there, they just thought we should have a meeting on some vague topic.

They weren’t pointless meetings because I have the other kind of agenda. :octopus: But I could have prepared something. (If I had to do this again, I would make a thousand slide powerpoint with pre-prepared topics.)

Anyway, my last several bosses have understood that’s a crappy thing to do. If they want me to hold a meeting, they tell me what they want me to hold it about, give me some parameters, and are available to answer questions if I have any.

I don’t get dragged into meetings where tips like this would help. :laughing:

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I’ll just leave this here:

Not precisely on the topic, but sort of kind of related.

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