Pause for thought

I got up at 6.30 fully intending to go out and attempt a 10k. I haven't been that far for a long, long time. But then the weather went all British Summery, so I've postponed that. This evening, if I can be bothered by then.

Anyway, this gave me some flopping on the sofa with coffee and a book time. I'm reading Jeremy Clarkson. I know I should object to his very existence, but I'm sorry, I think he's intelligent and very funny and you can't spend your life taking things personally, right? I also believe he's identified some particular traits that others, including Catherine Tate, have gone on to make a lot of money by caricaturing.

Anyway, I'm reproducing below his column from The Times, Sunday 15 April 2007. And by attributing it, I'm taking no credit for the bits I agree with and no responsibility for the bits I don't. If you know me, I hope you'll know which is (are?) which.

Jeremy's title for the article was 'What the hell are we saying here?'. I'd like to subtitle it with 'And does it need saying?'. Over to Jeremy.

A few weeks ago I became a businessman, which means I've started going to meetings. Or, as they should be known, 'places where nothing happens and nothing gets done'.

Here's how they go. Each of the people round the table expresses their opinion on a particular subject, and each of these opinions is completely different. Then, after you've drunk a cup of what might be coffee, but could be oxtail soup, a biggish woman - and it's always a woman - says: 'Well, we're outside the box here with a new kind of hybrid venture and we can't know what the result will be until we've run the flag up the flagpole and seen which way the wind's blowing.'

Plainly, you want to argue with this, but as you draw breath to speak you realise that what she just said didn't make any sense. And anyway, she hasn't finished.

'It's mission critical that we use blue-sky thinking and that we're proactive, not reactive, if we're to come up with a ballpark figure that we can bring to the table.'

Again, you raise a finger to make a point. But you don't know what that point might be, so you pour yourself another cup of winter-warming coffee broth, help yourself to another triangular tuna and cucumber sandwich and wait for the pastry-faced woman in culottes to finish.

'We must maintain a client focus so that we can incentivise the team and monetise the deliverables, and only then can we take it to the next level.'

You look round the table at all the old hands, the sort of people who whip out their laptops every time they're at an airportand know what a Wi-Fi looks like, and they're all nodding sagely, so you stop yourself from actually saying: 'I'm sorry but what the hell are you on about?'

Later on in the day, you ring the person who called the meeting and in less than a minute decide on a course of action. And then, when you get home, you wonder why it was necessary to have the meeting at all. So you can listen to a farmyard animal in a power suit turning nouns into verbs and talking rubbish for half an hour to mask the fact she hasn't got a single cohesive thought in her head.

To get round this problem, a friend and I developed a new scheme to make meetings more interesting. We would give each other a band as we walked through the door and then we'd compete to see how many of their song titles we could lob into the conversation without anyone noticing.

That's why, last week, I actually said: 'Every breath you take is like an invisible sun. We are spirits in a material world, or, as they say in France, Outlandos d'Amour.' And do you know what? Nobody batted an eyelid.

And nor did anyone cotton on when my friend replied by saying: 'We're on top of the world looking down on creation, and we are calling occupants of interplanetary craft.'

Eventually, though, even this became wearisome so I went on holiday, but even in the Caribbean there was no escape. A fax arrived from my new business colleagues advising me that there was to be a conference call at 2 p.m. Barbados time between people in Los Angeles, Aspen, London and Cairo.

I've never felt so important in my life. Me? On a conference call? Spanning the globe? Wow. I was so excited that I completely forgot about it until 1.55 p.m., by which time I was very drunk, and on a sailing boat.

No matter, I dialled the number, entered the security pin I'd been given and was asked to state my name so I could be introduced. 'Beep' went the phone, and then on came an electronic voice to say: 'Captain Jack Sparrow has joined the conversation.'

Conference calls are great. They're exactly like a normal meeting in that nothing happens and nothing gets done and everyone talks rubbish, but you don't have to sit there remembering not to fall asleep or what Culture Club did after 'Karma Chameleon'.

You can just pour yourself another rum punch and look out of the porthole. At one point, when the boat went about, or whatever it is sailing boats do when they turn round, I fell off my chair, dropped the phone and couldn't find it for five minutes, and when I finally rejoined the conversation nobody even noticed I'd been away.

Unfortunately, one of the decisions made in a follow-up phone call to the man who'd hosted the conference chat was that we'd have to go to Los Angeles.

Hollywood, America. And have meetings there, face to face with the people we hadn't been talking about because they were in the box and we were outside it, at the top of a flagpole seeing which way the wind was blowing.

Gulp. American business meetings. That'd be scary. A whole new raft of power women and even more white-collar nonsense. I'd better get sober.

Strangely, however, the Americans have got meetngs down to a fine art, which is probably why they have NASA and Microsoft and we have Betty's tea shoppe. You walk in and the receptionist asks if you'd like some 'wadder or something'. You are then ushered into a conference room where you say your piece, and when you've finished, their top man stands up, thanks you for coming and leaves.

They've realised that the meeting is useless for getting anything done, so they listen'n'go. And move straight to the follow-up phone call where the decisions are made.

I therefore have a new rule. If I go to a meeting, only I am allowed to speak. And then something happens.