Oh so busy
Still very busy at work. Got called into the big meeting yesterday to present mine and ONB’s paper. I was supposed to be in there for about an hour tops, just before lunch. Me and P got in there (she was also presenting two papers), and K (one of the guys I *love*) was presenting his paper.
Now, I really do *love* K. But, well, no nice way to put this, he is incredibly geeky. His paper, rather than being a nice high level summary, was full in-depth documentation. Which, give him his due, he did make an attempt to summarise. But he went on for about an hour (this was not as bad as some other guy earlier in the meeting, who is supposed to be the same level as me - known to LELI as “the Arsehole” - who basically read out his paper, word for word, and took 2 hours). Then P had to present her paper (it was very important to Z, apparently, the order in which things were presented). We had already run over into lunch break.
We broke for lunch, and I also broke my own rule of “always take an hour for lunch” since there was only a half hour space. Back to the meeting. Rather than P present her second paper, so she could leave, I had to present S’s paper. It went okay - a few comments (although Z, the tosser, has overnight changed how we compute things so he has to re-run all the figures, what a wanker).
Then P presents her - also received well.
We had taken about 45 minutes between us.
Then N - known to LELI as “the Arsehole’s friend” - presented a paper. It was blatantly obvious to me he had no clue what the paper was on about - it had been written by someone in K’s team. (We spoke about it today - even K has no idea why N was presenting it, he has had no input into the project at all, knows nothing about it, somehow he has managed to get his name attached to it because it could potentially give him brownie points I think). It took him over an hour.
By this time, we were way past the scheduled finish time of the meeting, and it was agreed we would carry on until it was finished.
At this point N jumps in, “Can I just talk about this?” he says, brandishing some sheets of paper.
“Is it a paper?” asks J, the chairman.
“Well, no, not really.”
“Then can it wait? We still have a lot of papers to get through and we are already over time.”
“Oh no, I must show it now, I need to get ‘buy-in’”. (Tosser).
He hands out some paper - all printed on the nice and expensive colour printer, the one we are not supposed to use unless we absolutely have to - which is basically some graphs and some tables. It is not a paper.
It was a blatant, “Hey, here is a room full of managers, I am going to show you what sort of work I am doing.” Only I am pretty sure he hasn’t done any of the work, because my friend L does a lot of work for him, and hates him because he never gives her any credit.
S, K and I are sat at one end of the table, rolling our eyes at each other.
He went on for over half an hour.
And to make matters worse, once he had finished he just upped and left, because his time was so precious he couldn’t waste any more if it!
It got to 20 to 5, and S and I still have a paper each to present.
I go first. “Well, I will make this brief, S’s paper is very similar to mine so that will also save us some time……” and off I go.
Then S presents hers.
We were both finished within 10 minutes.
“Now *that’s* how to present papers!”