Permission to go back to work, Mr Chairman...

Working at the museum is becoming annoying now. With the deadline for MLA accreditation coming up in mid-September, they're hectically doing everything they should have been doing for the last 6 months. This means lots of meetings. I don't like meetings. They're designed solely to make everyone in the room feel important and productive, when they are in fact neither. The whole way through todays meeting (which lasted 3 hours, an hour past its scheduled finish) I was thinking about all the useful stuff I should really have been doing rather than be sitting in a stuffy town hall conference room.

"Archives 7001-7801 could do with being sorted"
"I could really do with getting on with the A-M village cataloguing"
"We still don't have any labels for the Monmouth Room or Blake Room, and I need to re-arrange their walkthroughs since the last reshuffle"
"I need to configure the network sometime soon, otherwise the whole record database might crash"

And by the end of those 180 minutes of discussion, all I could see that we'd accomplished was: last years budget has been authorised, minutes for a meeting in March have been signed and stored, and general back-slapping for doing nothing particularly difficult was prevalent throughout.

One of the things I hate about meetings is the use of language people automatically assume when they enter the room. They start talking about themselves in the third person (and others as "Mr." or some title which holds no power outside those walls), meaningless congratulations are offered whenever possible, and people ask permissions that they don't need.
"Permission to respond to Mr. Woolrichs query, Chairman"
Of course you've got permission you slimy little reptile, he was addressing you!

The main thing I don't like about them though, is the time they take up, and the fact that they are seen as so important that they can't possibly be missed. It was for this reason that instead of going to Bristol today for a birthday, I was listening to a budget report for floor maintenance that happened about 8 months before I started working there. Its also quite likely that instead of partying it up in Newquay this summer, I'll be trapped in Bridgy, as they've managed to schedule at least a meeting a week up until the MLA deadline. This means I've not been able to book off a decent run of days, so I'll either miss a chunk of the holiday, or have to skip it completely.