Once again she was in a meeting. She hated meetings. More often than not they were unproductive and turned up more problems than answers. This one was particularly bad. It wasn’t supposed to just be a meeting, it was supposed to be a training session but the people facilitating kept using phrases like, “the client is thinking about…” and “they aren’t sure yet” and her favorite was “we don’t know. We hadn’t thought of that.”
Good god, what is the point? She thought. This is a complete waste of resources, hours and electronic memory space. This damn program hasn’t even been approved yet!
If not for the iPod ear bud in her right ear she’d really go nuts. She always worked better with music on. It made her more productive, more efficient and more methodical. God this is just a regurgitation of the crap we’ve already gone over! The only difference is new slides and a new facilitator who can’t even pronounce the name of the product.
She ground her teeth, stretched her back and stood up. She paced a small circle in the cubicle, having only a few feet of telephone cord tethering her to the desk. Through the windows beyond her desk and the phone base on it she could see the distant foothills and mountains separating the city from the desert. The haze made the third line of mountains and made the fourth line completely invisible.
Sitting again, she bent in half, hugged her knees and took a few deep breaths. Just another 15 minutes, maybe they’ll finish early. As she sat up and rest her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand she saw the final slide pop up asking for final questions. Checking the clock she rolled her eyes as her coworkers on the other end of the conference call continued discussing the same questions they’d already talked about for forty five minutes.
Leaning back in her chair she folded her arms behind her head and closed her eyes, barely listening to the summarization over the phone. As she let her mind wander from the meeting she began thinking back to the classes she took in college, the summers organizing snorkeling trips for the oceanography classes and the weeknights of grading papers for the chemistry department. It really wasn’t that long ago, just a few years; less than a decade.
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