The Nothing Meeting

Warriors, sometimes during your Cubeland adventures you will be bewildered. You will leave a meeting scratching your head and muttering “WTF?” (Because saying "fuck" too much looks bad and "WTF" is kind of funny in a hip, self-knowing, “I’m on my Balcberry too much” way.)

It won’t be the content of a meeting that causes your confusion, but rather the lack of any content whatsoever, the vacuum in the middle of the room that opens up seconds after you sit down, a vacuum spawned by everyone in the room wondering “Why am I here? What is this meeting really about?”

When this happens, you have experienced The Nothing Meeting. And like all meetings, you must know how to manage it accordingly.

You can tell you are in a Nothing Meeting if your boss starts by saying something like, “I just wanted to check in and see if everything was okay with (Blank).” The blank could be filled with “budget” or “planning” or “forecasting” or “hiring” or “unicorn wrangling” or anything at all, because it doesn't really matter.

The answer to your boss’ question should be, and probably is, “Everything is fine. Can I go now?”

But you can’t say that, because it’s your boss, and even though he has called a nonsensical meeting and is wasting your time, you need to remember your job, your true job – Make your boss glad you work for him.

So explain that everything is fine, then ask a few questions, seeing if you can figure what this meeting is really all about. It could be he was just lonely and felt like having a chat. It could be he heard something that concerned him, but he doesn’t want to tell you about it, so he’s asking generic questions to disguise what information he’s really after.

And sometimes, I swear, he will call a Nothing Meeting just because he can, because it makes him feel relevant, gives him a little buzz of empowerment. Perhaps the thought process is something like… “God, I am totally worthless, irrelevant and completely shit at my job. In fact, I can’t even figure out what my job really is. You know what I’ll do? Call a meeting. That’s a boss thing to do. Let’s get everyone in a room and talk about some stuff.”

So go in the room. Smile. Talk about whatever he wants to talk about.

It’s a Nothing Meeting, but if you increase your boss’s happiness in you working for him by smiling and chatting for an hour about nothing, it’s a Something Meeting.