Nothing to See Here: Have I mentioned how much I love meetings?

I especially like regularly scheduled meetings. They let me know, with just a glance at my calendar, that I am not going to get anything done. Now, that is what I call helpful. If productivity is important, then knowing when you cannot possibly get anything done is important because it helps you define your productive time better.

I am sorry. Did I get sarcasm all over you? Here… have a towel.

In defense of the culture that spawns these meetings, I am sure that at some point in the Neolithic past people did not communicate with each other very well. Some were probably banging rocks together, others beating on hollow logs, still another group probably used smoke signals. Naturally, nobody could agree on which protocol to use, so even within each of these groups communication was a problem. To resolve the impasse, somebody probably said, “Enough! You’re not allowed to communicate with each other any more unless you’re all sitting around a huge slab of wood!¹” …and the meeting was born.

In the ensuing 100,000 years, humankind has made many advances in communication. I am extremely excited by recent advancements in something called “natural language processing.” I understand that there are many incompatible variants of these “languages” — a veritable “Tower of Babel,” in fact — but let me focus on one that I have been dabbling in for a while called “English.” It turns out two communication end points can use “English” as a high level protocol to exchange “ideas.” The end points can transmit these ideas using a point-to-multipoint link layer protocol called “speech.” Unfortunately, speech only works over short distances and is subject to interference from other nearby “speakers.”

However, another exciting recent advance — SneakerNet™ — is a physical transport mechanism that allows speakers to move to within the required distances for effective use of speech as a communication mechanism. Many see this simply as an ad hoc form of a meeting. While I would agree that it is an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary advancement, I feel that it is useful in many cases where a traditional meeting is seen as a waste of time.

If you would like to try this new form of communication some time, you can stop by my office and “speak” to me… assuming, of course, that I am not in a meeting.