I was scheduled to head over to a client’s place earlier today for a meeting. It was arranged for a large group of ten or more people so I kind of had a rough idea of what things were going to be like. Large meetings were usually disorganized and I knew that there was no way everyone in the meeting was going to be engaged all at the same time. What I didn’t know though, was how much some people didn’t want to be engaged or involved.
It turned out that a total of 17 of us had to squeeze into a tiny meeting room that had a long meeting table and it was really interesting to observe how people went about choosing their seats.
The ones who turned out to be more attentive during the meeting were the ones chose seats that had them seated around the table, but there were the odd few who grabbed their chairs and planted themselves near the walls and corners of the room. The table had space for 14 people to be comfortably seated around, so that didn’t explain why 7 of them were seated away from the table.
One guy even claimed that he didn’t have to sit by the table because he didn’t have a notebook with him to take down notes on. This really surprised me. Why bother turning up for a meeting without a notepad or anything to take down notes on?
True enough, he slept through most of the meeting and didn’t say a word.
Having met him for the first time, I could only infer that he either probably wasn’t interested, slept really late the night before, or probably doesn’t give a shit about how he performs at work.
“Taking the back seat” syndrome. We learn something new everyday.