The Spanish Meeting Bus

I hate meetings.

Hate.

Despise.

Loathe meetings.

Can't say why, really. I suspect it has to do with a calculation I rattled off one afternoon during my corporate years, putting a number to how many hours of my adult life I had already spent sitting in meetings. Several weeks, as I recall. Appalling.

For the record, I do love wild, unexpectedly contentious - or creative - meetings. It's weekly round-the-table check-ins and world-touring agendas that make my skin crawl.

Off my back, under the table and out the door.

Til there I sit, irritable. Skinless.

Here's where I should explain something: I was raised by business wolves. I cut my corporate teeth working in a savagely entrepreneurial company where time really was money. The CEO told me so. And if we'd been able to get our hands on a marble statue of a nymph-like goddess called Results, we would happily have rubbed her head and kissed her toes on the way in and out every day.

The millionaire CEO of that highly profitable wolves' den was a German immigrant who, as he told it, arrived in the US at the tender age of 19 with 3 dollars in his pocket. (I've always wondered how German arrived with dollars, but we'll assume he changed them at the airport.) He started meetings by his own satellite-calibrated watch and balanced a metal garbage pail just inside the conference room door to surprise anyone who dared crawl in late - or dispute the satellite-guaranteed hour.

I tell you all this to illustrate the depth of my dislike for the senseless human act of meeting just to meet. Here's what my wolf parents taught me about meetings and memos: Avoid them. When that doesn't work, start them on time, get to the point and get everybody back to what makes money.

Ah, but I live in Spain now.

It's not the sheer volume of Spanish meetings-just-to-meet that has my skin missing in action for weeks at a time. Although the volume is impressive.

Nor is it the epic journey taken by each and every agenda, though a Dutch colleague and I have enthusiastically pointed out the striking resemblance between many of our meetings and, well, the EU, for example.

It's not all that.

It's the darn Spanish Meeting Bus.

Ever call a meeting and nobody came? Well, in Spain, nobody EVER comes. Til the bus goes out to get them.

Allow me to illustrate my point:
Scene: 10 o'clock meeting called by who knows who.
10:01: Cut to the conference room, where our fearless wandering American sits alone.

10:15: Alone she sits.

10:20: Wandering American begins to make the rounds, in what I have affectionately named the Spanish Meeting Bus.

- Knock knock!! Diez y veinte!
- Hola, everybody still working happily at your desks! Don't we have a meeting at 10:00?

Until the bus physically rounds up each and every participants, nothing. This isn't late. This isn't even the legendary (and fictional, if you ask me) Spanish mañana.

This is nunca. Bordering on nunca jamás. Never.

I have an idea. If we start the darn things I bet we'll finish earlier.

Anybody want to buy an imaginary bus?