On Meetings and Mammalian Social Politics
I hate meetings. This is because I work for Dysfunction, Inc. Dysfunction Inc. is an amazing company that, despite its best efforts to the contrary, makes money hand over fist, runs in the black at all times, and is immune to most market fluctuations. Someone from a prestigious and overly expensive business school or economics department should do a study of this place. But I digress. Anytime someone mentions the word meeting I have to stop myself from immediately standing up, screaming, and running from the building as fast as I can. Meetings are excruciating and contentious occurrences. People get in a room, talk at each other, refuse to listen to each other, and nothing gets decided except that there needs to be another meeting to discuss the meeting that has just occurred, all the while no work that really needs to be done actually gets done. There are some people here that spend all their time in meetings. I don’t know how they do it. Perhaps they all have very good therapists or go home and are horribly abusive to their families and loved ones, who then have very good therapists. Or they go home a drink themselves into a stupor. I don’t know. I spend most of my time avoiding meetings, so much so that I’ve taken to filling up every moment of my time on my Outlook Calendar so that it appears I’m booked solid and no one can call me into a meeting using that program. This is the only way work gets done. I also have a lot of doctor’s appointments. This has now become code for me leaving early so I can go to the barn, get some horse therapy, and perhaps go for a nice hack in the woods.
Now other mammals and/or animal “meetings” are fascinating. I have a variety of birds (aren’t mammals, obviously) that frequent my bird feeders. Over time, I’ve come to notice that the Downy Woodpecker’s presence trumps all other birds at the suet, with the exception of the Starlings. But the Starlings only get supremacy in the pecking order by sheer force of numbers. The Downy Woodpeckers, especially the male, will chase birds much bigger than them away, like Blue Jays and Flickers. Of course, in the summer, it doesn’t matter how big you are, the one bird that rules the feeder area, where I grow lots of flowers, is the hummingbird. Those little suckers will take on anything and anyone. The flowers are theirs.
There is an odd parallel between the birds meeting on my deck and the meetings at Dysfunction, Inc. The CEO and most of the Vice Presidents of the company are very small in stature and physique. They are tiny little people, and much like the tiny little hummingbirds, they spend a lot of time chasing the rest of us around, irritating us, and keeping us from getting a proper lunch.
Gray squirrels are fascinating as well. I spent a whole winter watching their antics. This was when I lived in Maine and the winters were much more severe and there were a hell of a lot of gray squirrels living in the wooded areas around my home. Gray squirrels, when not chasing each other all over the place in some sort of pheromone induced frenzy, spend an awful lot of time sniffing each other’s butts much like dogs do.
Red squirrels don’t seem to do this. The red squirrels came by themselves. They would spend most of their time sitting right smack in the middle of the feeder happily stuffing seeds and nuts in their mouths instead of wasting a lot of energy chasing their fellows around or sniffing their associate’s butts.