Meetings. I’m not really used to those. In fact, the other week I had a senior member of staff from the school I work at ask “Are you still coming to this meeting today?” and although my mind was more deserted than a ghost town from some western, I just looked up at her and said “Yeah, of course I am”.

About 30 minutes later I found myself in a room with a long table - one of those ones with a guy at the end of it and everyone else sat at the sides, all leaning into the center and nodding and “hmm”ing all the way through. It is at this point I should probably point out that I had NO IDEA what was going on! I had no idea what they were talking about and I had no idea why I was there. I managed to look like I was involved by writing down website addresses when they got mentioned.

However, that’s not always enough to look convincing. Even the whole “Smile and Nod” thing can only get you so far. The real way to show that you have either an interest or an understanding in something is to disagree! To disagree means that you not only know what you’re on about but that you also have an opinion. I’m not entirely sure what I disagreed with, or whether it was a bad thing to disagree with it - but somehow I got away with it. And I still have my job.

Yesterday I was sent somewhere. Beforehand I wasn’t sure if it was a conference or a training session. It was training, which is good. They sent me with the Deputy Head. Just me and him. It’s times like that that you begin to sweat. Turns out that it was all about something that I was told about ages ago in regards to a new web-based communication and resource tool for staff and students that we’re trialing out. During the training we had to test different things and I kept putting in random things involving eskimos and dragons and ninjas and soggy blue socks and cheese sandwiches with honey etc.

Today I had my review at work because I’m still on my probationary period. I did quite well, aside from two points. Firstly, there’s my lateness (oops). And secondly, I got in trouble for the random comments I left on our site during the training session. Whilst they were just there as test data as an alternative to “blah blah blah” etc, they were shown on the electronic whiteboard to everyone else at the training session. Even people running the training who weren’t there picked up on it. Whilst they found it funny (the main guy who was talking even said “…And this is coming from the man who has the username ‘WebGuy’!”) my manager didn’t. Basically, I’m supposed to be representing the school and apparently my humour is not considered behaving in a professional manner and not a good way to represent the school (which to be honest is fair enough).

Never thought my sense of humour would get me into trouble. Guess I was wrong. Which means I could be wrong about a lot more things. Like my ‘Play-doh for Adults’ scheme. It isn’t really a scheme and it doesn’t even exist but at the root of it all, at the core - I believe that all adults should be re-introduced to play-doh under the influence of Shloer and the supervision of children. And those children should be allowed sticks to poke any adults who appear to be unimpressed or not amused.

Stupid adults. Everyone knows Play-Doh is fun! But do you know what just isn’t fun?

- Meetings.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 3rd, 2005 at 11:04 pm and is filed under General, Shloer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.