Time once again for more tales from the office.
On three separate occasions recently I have been in a meeting where I have witnessed a coworker sleeping. Not falling asleep. Not dozing off. We're talking full-blown, it's-a-good-thing-you-don't-snore sleep here. Two of these occasions have been the same colleague. In my own defense, I would like to state that at none of these meetings was I in charge in charge or in anyway responsible for the content of the meetings. If people found them boring, it had nothing to do with me.
The most recent incident was definitely the most amusing, as it involved a group of twenty people packed into a very small conference room in which the table only seats about 6. This means that most of us were seated in chairs along the walls with our attention directed toward the table in the center of the room and the few people seated at it.
I'll give you one guess as to where the sleeping colleague was sitting. Take your time...That's right. Right at the table in the middle of the room where everyone was almost forced to look at him.
At one point during the meeting there was a discussion of some data that was needed to help understand a problem. One of the people along the wall was trying to explain the situation and said*, "I think what we have found before was that the widget percentage is supposed to be less than 5%, and we got results like 1 or maybe 2%. Is that right JimJoeBob?" Pause...Silence..."JimJoeBob?" At this point, JimJoeBob looked up with a completely lost look on his face and looked around the room, bewildered, for a moment. Fortunately, the person originally asking the question repeated it. "Oh," JimJoeBob replied, "well the widget percentage is supposed to be less than 5%, and so far we get around 3%." Relieved and completely oblivious that a large portion of his answer was actually word for word what had just been said, JimJoeBob settled back in and waited a few moments before drifting back off to sleep.
I know the work I do is not the most exciting in the world. The meetings tend to drag, and the discussions can be rather dry. Come on people. If you are going to do something for a living, shouldn't you at least be able to stay awake during a rather intense and important discussion of it? I guess not everyone feels that way.
Until later...
*Names, data and subject matter have been changed to protect the narcoleptic.
June 25, 2005
Life on the Pharm: Snoozefest
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3 comments:
Well I fall asleep all the time at work. But it's just kind of what we do at 5:00 a.m. when the calls haven't started coming in yet. I don't think I'd ever fall asleep in a meeting though. That's a little white trash even for me. You stay awake when people are talking in the trailer park. It's only polite after all.
In defence of JimJoeBob - I fall asleep all the time. As soon as my mouth stops moving, the brain stops being interested and falls imediately asleep to conserve valuable talking energy.
I always fall asleep in meetings and lectures - I can't help it (and it doesn't matter how much sleep I had the night before). I slept through a whole bunch of industrial relations bargaining meetings and I was doing the minutes. Whenever someone agreed to something important, one of the guys had to elbow me so I could write it down.
I once fell asleep at a rock gig (two feet from the Marshall stack) and the bouncer tried to throw us out because he thought I was on drugs. I even had to show him my pupils before he believed that I wasn't stoned.
Wow, you really are the laziest girl.
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