Sometimes there's a good reason for a lot of people to turn up to a meeting, even though the meeting itself serves no purpose.
Two weeks ago, we scheduled an organisational meeting for tonight, expecting to have things to organise, which it turns out we don't. So why not use email and telephone to tell everyone who might come not to bother? Because some people don't answer their phones, some don't read their emails frequently, and there's always a few we'd forget to tell anyway.
So a few people would turn up, have nothing to do, and probably be annoyed, especially if it's inconvenient for them to be there. And they might decide we're a bunch of jerks and decide not to work with us anymore.
Plus, instead of the organisers spending half an hour reminding the necessary people to come, they'd spend three times as long telling everyone who might come not to. Knowing they still wouldn't reach everyone.
However, in this case there's another reason. One of the new members is definitely coming, and two other newbies might be. Which means we need a room full of people and an agenda full of topics, to make it seem worth their while. Otherwise all their enthusiasm and energy will evaporate in a small, dull, quiet meeting.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one reason why so many meetings are completely pointless.
I really hate wireless networking. That is, I love it when it works properly, but hate it when it doesn't - and most of the time, it just doesn't.
I've got three PCMCIA cards, and one USB card, each with their own set of drivers, none of which will work if any of the other drivers are installed. And none of which have worked properly when I tried them over the last week.
For some reason, network drivers seem especially prone to conflict with other, unrelated software - which may be the problem with my system. So what, if anything, is the driver conflicting with? Firefox, Reason, Audition, Sonar, Roxio, Digiguide, Winamp, or what?
In short: Gah!
One of those who might be there is Tom - tall, slim, tanned, muscular, intelligent and completely heterosexual. Though he quite likes being lusted after by a bloke, so that's my excuse for doing it.
We've been working on a song - his music, my lyrics and voice - to his specification of "dark and dirty". The working title is Funky Shi'ite, but it's about...well...dark and dirty sex.
The chorus isn't together yet, and the 2 verses will need some tweaking, but this is what they look like now:
Verse 1:
Breathing in the flavours of a girl or a boy
You can be thinking of another but you can't be coy
You've got to learn to hold back as you learn to enjoy
It's a game of skill but it's not just a toy
Nothing to lose if you forget to refuse, sir
You're the mover, you are homosapien too
Know what you're doing if you don't know who
Let your god kneel before you
Verse 2:
Wanted to stay and you're ready to go
Get high as a kite, down dirty and low
Pulse racing too fast though we're taking it slow
Give it room to flow, give it time to grow
Heavy like a sledgehammer touch of a feather
Fizzy on the tongue like the sizzle of leather
hanging on the hip hop, feels like forever
hitting on the sweet spot, together we endevour
EDIT: I heard one interesting bit of news at the meeting. Reg Keys is the father of a soldier who died in Iraq, and he symbolically stood against Tony Blair as an independant antiwar candidate at the last by-elections. Now he's trying to set up an antiwar electoral party called Spectre, and is talking about putting up candidates in the wards of the 70 most prowar MPs at the next election. This raises several questions.
* What kind of idiotic name is "Spectre" for a political party? If it's meant as a reference to the spectre of war, most people will connect it with the James Bond version of Al Quaida.
* Respect may not be a major force, but it is recognised as the antiwar party. Is Keys trying to split the vote, destroy Respect, subsume it, or what? And why? Oh, and is it coincidence that Spectre is an anagram of Respect?
* Who is funding this fiasco? It takes a lot of cash just to put up 70 candidates, and a lot more to run a party behind them. And as for putting on 70 election campaigns, forget it. If this is another attempt to derail the Respect party by confusing the public about it, like Tony Blair's slough of speeches about the young lacking "respect", it's a lot more expensive, and just as likely to sink without trace.
To me, the whole thing sounds like a hoax.
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