Bored Meeting

Editor’s Note: Any likeness to any individual is purely coincidental and unintentional.  Carrot should in no way be compared to, or considered to have any likeness to our protagonist.  This is purely fictional and didn’t happen in real life on Thursday.

You wouldn’t think that growing up with a name like Carlic Knox would be much fun.  Kids can be brutal when it comes to names, but I quite like it.  Carlic is a full-bodied name, a family name, a name handed down from generation to generation, from father to son.  Although, that wasn’t the case for me. 

I’m not sure why my parents named me Carlic, as far as I can tell not one branch on my family tree has ever been called Carlic.  In fact, there’s a chance that no one on earth has ever been named Carlic.  That is, until me!  Carlic Knox!  You might be thinking that my name sounds an awful lot like garlic knots and believe me, you wouldn’t be the first to think it.  It just so happens that my favorite food is garlic knots, so when kids used to say ‘Carlic Knox likes garlic knots’, I was able to smile in agreement.  All told, the teasing wasn’t so bad.  I can’t say the same for my former classmate.  I’m not sure what Mr. and Mrs. Behah were thinking when they named their son Klay.

I’m also not sure who actually likes going to meetings, but they’re much more interesting when you have to fill out a confidentially agreement.  I’m not sure what the big secret is, everybody knows why we’re here and everybody knows what we’re doing…Come to think about it, I may have misspoken.  You might not know why we’re here and what we’re doing, but that doesn’t matter at all.  Which brings me back to the point.  This meeting is so insignificant that signing a confidentiality agreement seems unnecessarily excessive.  Nonetheless, it’s still more interesting when we can’t talk about it.  Now, this confidentially agreement prohibits me from speaking on the details of the meeting topic, but surely, I’m free to speak on the non-topical details.

The meeting was set in a conference room.  There must have been sixteen of us sitting around a large conference table.  We were each seated in comfy faux-leather chairs, not overly comfy, but certainly comfier than most other chairs in the building.  They’re the type of chairs that may not impress every guest, but they also wouldn’t insult every guest either.  I like the chairs, my only complaint is that when raised too high, they can’t slide nicely under the table.  I’m not sure if that’s technically a complaint about the height of the chairs, or the height of the table?

I liked everyone sitting around the table, I’ve worked with most of them for a long time, and not one of them ever called me ‘Garlic Knots’ at least not to my face, in fact they never even mentioned that my name sounds like garlic knots, which is not easy to do.  I once met a girl named Erica, and it took everything I had in order to not say ‘America’ when she introduced herself saying “I’m Erica”.

Finding sixteen people who get along is not an easy feat, but as evidenced by today’s meeting, it is possible.

The table had mics embedded into the wood top, electrical outlets for charging computers and phones, and ceramic coasters.  Only one person used a coaster.  I don’t suppose that she respected the wood finish of the table any more than the rest of us, it’s just that she was the only one using a bottle that could sweat.  I was using a glass water bottle with a rubber base, and so were several others.  I kind of want to note what the coaster person was drinking because it’s something I’ve never seen before, and it looked delicious.  Sadly, it may be covered by the terms confidentially agreement as a distinguishing factor, so you’ll have to use your imagination.

There were doors on either end of the room, a wall sized monitor behind the head of the table, one blank wall, and one wall with five faded pictures of horses grazing in a field.  If I were in charge of the happenings in that room, I would immediately remove those pictures.  I was asking myself throughout the meeting what would be more offensive to my sensibilities, the five faded horse pictures or five patronizing pictures with motivational expressions like “Achieve” or “Success” written in some gentrifying font.  I decided that neither are acceptable and would prefer nearly anything to faded horses or patronizing expressions.  Among replacement pictures that I would favor are ironic and non-ironic photos of clowns, a movie poster from Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, a shelf with meaningless awards, some photos of a carabiner, or a mural of an old-timey bike.  Ideally the walls would have actual pieces of art from local artists, but in the end what would I even be thinking about if it wasn’t for the horses.

Prior to the meeting, one colleague looked right at me and said “I get to sit next to my buddy”, I was happy to know that we were buddies, until they turned to another colleague and sat next to them.  Now, I’m not sure if we’re buddies or not?  There is a real chance that this person, the one who gave me the cold shoulder likes the horse pictures, if that’s the case, I’m not sure that we could be buddies, and so I’m suspending judgement on buddydom until we get a clearer perspective on their boardroom picture preferences.

As the meeting got started, I couldn’t help but consider how this group would perform as the cast for an updated and less intriguing version of the classic board game Clue.  The idea is a little dark, but if we expand beyond the conference room, it could work.  Imagine solving a crime where Meat-Pie Mikey did it with an aux cable in the conference room.  You can imagine Horoscope Haley with a stapler in the copy room, or Know-It-All Nancy boring her victim to death with a story about purchasing orders in the foyer.  Maybe the whole death trope is a little too much, we should probably swap the killing portion of the game with something like going over budget.  How suspenseful it would be to open up the small confidential envelope to find out it was Carlic Knox with the copy toner in the men’s room. 

Speaking of budget, I wonder what the budget for the faded horse pictures was? 

As the meeting wrapped up we were lucky enough to set the dates for four more meetings.  I can’t wait, but for now it’s off to the next meeting of the day. Unfortunately the next meeting comes with no confidentiality agreement, you can only imagine how exciting that will be! But after that, it’s another meeting! 

Finally, after that, it’s off to the climbing gym!