Hadn’t been to a meeting in about a decade.
Been to Zoom ‘meetings’, but once retired your live meeting quota tends to be zero. Which is fine by me.
Working at the Coca-Cola Co. for 35 years, I probably attended 25,000+ meetings, many of which I hosted and/or moderated.
Many of which I stared open-mouthed into space, pretending to be listening – the places I went in my mind! Katmandu is cool!
And if I did the math correctly, I was probably in meetings for a couple of years – or more. Or more.
If I were a bear, that’d have been a lot of hibernation…
Can’t remember many of them.
There were a variety of meetings at Coke:
Plain 1-2 hour jobs, with a lot of flex, depending upon the planner: loosely or tightly agendaed, starting and ending on time – though probably not, hopefully moving to a ‘conclusion’.
Those held at a Bottler facility, working on local marketing plans. Bottlers distributed Coke products, but were more than ‘distributors’, they were integral parts of the planning processes. They were also pretty smart, knowing a visitor might arrive with money.
The things I’ve done for money – a meeting seems like an easy way to ‘get ye some’.
Multi-day meetings, called ‘off-site’ meetings, 3-5 days in duration, with dinners and alcohol at night – the perfect recipe for destroying one’s marriage – or gout.
Gout a disease I got frequently in my 30s and 40s, and incredibly painful – particularly when I got it in my knee – a religious experience that. There isn’t a cure, and I don’t think they’re even looking anymore: They’ve reclassified it as rheumatoid arthritis and moved on.
Which makes sense: It doesn’t kill anyone, a lot of people don’t know they’ve got it when they’ve got it –“Is hot to the touch!” I heard at my initial diagnosis – and it’s called the ‘Rich Man’s Disease’ because it affected males who ate sardines and meat back in 1910. That last thing tells you how science hasn’t evolved on gout.
My Captor would be ‘helpful’ whenever I’d get it, suggesting causes like drinking too much beer, not enough exercise, eating rich foods, or drinking too much beer (she really liked that one) – essentially all the things that gave me pleasure.
I never believed there to be cause and effect from any of that, and the medicine had tough side effects, so I’d be limping every couple of months.
Now, back to our regular programming…
But looking back at my time at Coke, it was a definite meeting culture, which needed work:
Meetings would end in ‘consensus’, dissolving in hallway grumbling afterwards.
Anyone who described a meeting as ‘interesting’ would be asked: “What was f*ed up about it?”
The person who’d say what you’d just said, but getting a much better response.
I always believed if a Coca-Cola meeting were a football team, 9 of the 11 players in the huddle would be involved in redesigning the football – as proof, New Coke was the product of a meeting…
As another aside: My ice breaker when moderating meetings, I’d ask attendees where they were when they heard about New Coke – today that only applies to someone 50+.
All this came dredging up when I was in Atlanta for our AAMCO ad pool meeting, the annual session of the Atlanta dealers to decide on our marketing spending for 2025.
I ended up attending virtually – maybe I have a fear of live meetings…
Why’d I tell you all this?
This was the dreaded week I didn’t have anything to write about, so I wrote about nothing.
For 253 more posts like this –each with a wish for an agenda– go to beersatthenifty.com. Your phone will display every post, and you can waste an hour or so.
ENHANCE YOUR ENJOYMENT OF THIS POST, PAIR IT WITH THE FOLLOWING ‘AGING HIPSTER MUSIC’:
Portugal. The Man is a fine band from Wasilla, AK, and they are the best rock band ever from Alaska – though Jewel was raised there, sang and yodeled with her father. So there’s that. Impressive – yodeling is really tough.
I’ve added ‘Modern Jesus’ ‘So American’ ‘Live in the moment’ ‘Feel it Still’ and ‘So Young’ to the BATN playlist. I would have added something by Jewel- loved her in the Hallmark Mystery Channel’s Fixer Upper Mysteries, she’s sold 30 million albums, and she’s dating Kevin Costner – but I don’t know her music. I confused her with Fiona Apple, so I’ve added ‘Shadowboxer’ by her.