I want my money back...

... Because I can't get back the time I just wasted in an all-day team offsite for work.

Holy yawn-fest and a complete waste of time.

I knew it was going to suck when the agenda was sent to us at 5pm last night. Loads of notice, eh? Then I noticed that I was slotted in to present twice - 2 different topics and no time to prepare. So I grabbed the training manuals, took them home to review and then spent precious subway time, and morning cereal time reviewing them so I didn't appear like an ass in front of my superiors and colleagues.

The day was set to begin at 9:15am. We got there with coffee in hand at 9:10, and the room was pretty full. Impressive. But still we waited until 9:30 to being, which set us back 2 agenda items, and the day went downhill from there. By 2:45, the time for me to present my second topic (the first one was scrapped because the group manager had discussed it and I borought up my issues at that time, we were on the agenda item called for 11:30. Yikes. The day was set to end at 3:15. We ended at 3:45, basically ignoring all the rest of the actually important stuff. What even more odd, is that 2 people left the meeting at morning break, and never came back!??! Yikes.

The 2 facilitators were quite unique in their own right... One, my boss, was articulate, funny, sure he goes off track a lot, but he makes his point and he makes it clearly. The other... yikes... He is the King of the false starts. He begins a sentence then pauses as if he is now picturing in his mind which word goes best next. They after taking a route, he realizes what he is talking about, so he switches the conversation another direction, finally ending it on a completely different introduction. Its sad. I wants to smack him on the back and shout "spit it out!!!".

For example, "I think that we need... ahhh, should be focusing, on taking a different... er... Another course, or plan of action to resolve and clear up this, problem, which he have to focus on go come up with another solution by taking a different course of action...

Jumble like that. And he speaks really slowly, so you can tell he is totally doing that. And you manage, why???

So throughout the day him, and one of my peers, basically talked the mumbojumbo talk and confused the rest of us as to whether that was in fact English, or related to anything that we were discussing. It usually was not.

One funny thing did occur. If you see my previous "Stupid Sister" post, you will find this comment funny. One of the stupid sisters was in attendance and at one point during our sponsored lunch, she turned to the girl beside her, while chewing on a piece of cellery and said, "I wonder how they make the celery so crunchy?"
Yikes. But was very thought provoking as it made me wonder how infact they get the carrots to be do damn crunchy, and the broccoli so damn green??? It's a miracle!

So we ended the day having resolved not a thing. We are no closer to knowing what our new work plan will be, nor do I think anyone in management cares. After all it was management that got singled out in the press for being incompetant, not us. When our stats come up in 6 months and most of our team are still way out in left-field this will be why. They had a chance to set the recond straight and get us moving in the right direction but chose to not put in the effort, and it shows.

I actually had to mention to one of the facilitators that they should acknowledge the efforts of the 2 women colleagues who ordered, set up, brought in, then cleaned up lunch for us, as well as our group manager who paid for it, so at 2pm they decided to do it, and then at 2:20 and again at 3:30. Yikes.

When i met with them last week to discuss the agenda and help them set up the format, I told them how I thought it would be effectivly run and how to get the answers they needed while rolling everything out clearly and conceisly to the staff and they chose to take a different route. At least my way would not have resulted in all the staff betting on which of their peers were going to fall asleep first. I was wrong. One guy head-bobbed throughout the first 3 hours. It was that dry.

So back to work I went as if the day had not happened, although I feel like I wasted a full day.