{"id":3741,"date":"2009-06-08T10:04:36","date_gmt":"2009-06-08T10:04:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/06\/08\/meetings-from-hell-round-wire\/"},"modified":"2009-06-08T10:04:36","modified_gmt":"2009-06-08T10:04:36","slug":"meetings-from-hell-round-wire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/06\/08\/meetings-from-hell-round-wire\/","title":{"rendered":"Meetings From Hell: Round Wire or Square Wire?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom at Swans On Tea comments on an article about meetings<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The most common meeting in my experience is the status meeting, where everyone gets together and reports on what they’ve accomplished. If it’s a small group, these are usually fine because you already have familiarity with the tasks. But when you get a large group together, which has diverse tasks and goals, there is impending disaster. Bad meetings I’ve attended often involve people discussing details that nobody else at the table understands or possibly cares about — the sort of thing that should happen one-on-one or in a small group, as everyone else sits there, trying not to fall asleep.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The worst case I know of was a BEC project meeting attended by both theorists and experimentalists where a ludicrous amount of time was spent debating the relative merits of making coils out of tubing with a round cross section versus tubing with a square cross section. This led to the splitting of the BEC meetings into separate experimental and theoretical meetings, and became a buzzword with the theory crowd– whenever an experimental discussion got too thick, they would ask “Does this involve round wire, or square wire?”<\/p>\n

Because I have an exam at 8:30 this morning, let’s throw this out for an audience participation thread:<\/p>\n

\n

What’s the most absurdly detailed discussion you’ve ever been forced to sit through for no good reason?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The excess detail could be technical, bureaucratic, safety-related, or any other category of mind-numbing. All that matters is that it’s something you had absolutely no reason to listen to, but you were forced to be at the meeting.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(I’m pretty sure I’ve told this story before, but again, 8:30 am exam. You’re lucky you’re not getting cute-baby pictures as filler…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom at Swans On Tea comments on an article about meetings: The most common meeting in my experience is the status meeting, where everyone gets together and reports on what they’ve accomplished. If it’s a small group, these are usually fine because you already have familiarity with the tasks. But when you get a large… Continue reading Meetings From Hell: Round Wire or Square Wire?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experiment","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}