Workplace Note-taking OCD

O.K. I don’t get this whole note-taking obsession in meetings here at my workplace.

First, everyone sits around in a meeting with printouts and pens and madly scribbles as they talk.  Generally, they’re all scribbling the same thing.  Then after the meeting, someone is designated as the person to type it all up and send it out in an email so everyone has those print-outs for the next meeting so everyone can repeat the process at the next meeting.

Anyway, I apparently got “in trouble” yesterday as I was reported to my boss for showing up to a meeting with no pen or printouts.  The meeting-callers felt that I did not appear “engaged” in the project.

So, of course, my boss wanted to know if I was “engaged” in the project.

Well, first I told him that I was ambushed as I my schedule indicated that it wasn’t that kind of meeting.  Second, I told him that at the end of the meeting I had requested them (the clients) to please type up their new request and sign off on it before I started work on it so that I would know that this is the final plan from the project.

Once he heard that he was o.k. with it.  This project has been going along since before I was here and apparently yesterday’s meeting was the kind of meeting you have at the very beginning of a project — for example, when you sit down and start discussing with the interface programmer what you want in each field of the interface after you’ve basically signed off on the interface being done and it’s being tested, there’s a serious pbroblem.  I basically told them that this sort of discussion means that we are going to have to start completely over.

So, apparently, I did need a pen, but when I went into the meeting, I believed that the interfaces were finished and my job was basically done.  I thought we were just reviewing.

tags: work

One comment

1. on April 27, 2006 at 8:16 am

   Tamara said:

   That is … odd. Not just the note-taking, but the tattling that you didn’t take notes! Glad you were able to explain it to your boss to his satisfaction! And glad you have the kind of boss who immediately comes to you when he hears something like that, to get your side of the story, ASAP.

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