The Big Important Meeting (fiction)

In honor of Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came To The End, I’ve written a short piece of office-set fiction:

Here’s how it began:

We were all - four from my team and four from our partner team, plus our Sponsor, and the Legend, and the Dragon, and the Grownup, and someone’s Admin, sitting around the table in the Room for Important Meetings.

My hands were shaking. I’d never presented to the Legend before. I had never even met the Dragon - and she was known to make grown programmers cry, much less very junior Planners like me.

The Dragon took a pen out of the plastic coffee mug in the center of the table and rapped it loudly on the table. She took out another pen and stacked it on top of the first. Very rapidly, using all the pens in the mug, she began to build a log-cabin type of structure out of ballpoints and softgels. As she did this, she glanced pointedly at the Legend.

“What’s with the pens?” asked our Sponsor.

“Oh!” said the Dragon. “Earlier on, my Junior lost a pen. The Legend thinks we’re stealing them.”

“You need a personal stash. A locked cabinet or a helicopter delivery,” said our Sponsor to the Legend.

The Legend nodded. Those of us who were there to present waited for some signal that the meeting should begin. We had handed out our handouts; my counterpart had his computer all set to display the Flowcharts, and I had my printed notes laid out in front of me, marked with red pen, ready to explain the Plan.

It was a Plan not unrelated to Plans that other junior Planners had presented before me. These previous Plans had all more or less gone down in flames. My ambitions for success were pretty much limited to avoiding derision and the sort of embarrassing screw-ups that lead to multiple nights of insomnia. If I came away with a good story, that would be a golden success. If no one asked how I’d gotten hired and no one said, “It sucks, go away and come back when you have your heads out of your asses,” I would be ecstatic.

The Legend got up and left the room. The rest of us waited. In most meetings, we would have opened our laptops and started checking our email or sending instant messages to one another. In this meeting, we sat quiet, our hands folded. We waited.

After a while the Legend came back and sat down.

“Let’s get started,” said our Sponsor. She reminded everyone of why were here, what we were here to talk about, and what we wanted from the Titled in the room.

“Thanks,” said the Senior on our team. He gave a followup introduction, explaining in a little more detail why we were here. He introduced those of us the Legend hadn’t met.

And then it began. My counterpart gave the first section, brought up the first Flowchart on the projector screen, and then nodded at me. I explained the Flowchart, what we wanted to do and why. My counterpart and I had carefully laid out the rhythm of the presentation: he would lead in; I would explain the What, which was the longest section and most prone to questions; he would explain the Why; he would close and I would support. Our Seniors were there for backup. Our Engineers would take any technical questions.

I got about halfway into my section.

“We get it,” said the Legend. “But why not....” and explained what he wanted.

“Oh, sure,” said the Dragon derisively. “We could just....” and spun out her own idea.

“We need to consider the revenue from...” said our Sponsor.

My counterpart and I sat quiet. Every now and then I asked a question or ventured a statement; every now and then my counterpart attempted to bring the conversation back to our presentation. He didn’t have much luck. Once one of our engineers raised a point about data flow. The Legend answered, and the conversation returned to its previous track of possibilities.

About an hour later, our Sponsor asked the Grownup for his opinion. “It sounds okay,” the Grownup said.

My team, and our partner team, and the Dragon, and our Sponsor, all nodded, stood up, and left. The Legend and the Grownup and the Admin stayed behind. Already there was another junior Planner waiting to present. We were two and a half hours late.

We went to the room next door and Debriefed. What was the outcome? What were our next steps? Who would drive? An hour and a half later we had made our way through a Thought Experiment and were on to Deliverables.

Outside the window we could see it was growing dark.

“Okay,” we said to one another, “okay.” We wished each other good weekends and good Friday nights. We wished these things sincerely. One person who knew I still had to pack a bunch of stuff before the movers came wished me good luck.

We picked up our laptops and car keys and notebooks and pens and empty recyclable coffee cups. We gathered our jackets in our arms, balancing everything carefully (but some of us would drop things anyway).

“Later,” we said, as we left the room. We did not specify what would happen later, or what we were referring to. Tired, exhausted, with a sense of the week having drawn finally - gratefully! - to a close, we followed one another out into the darkened hallway, and dispersed into Friday Night, and the Weekend.