What's Floating Around Cloud 9? 25 September 2017

Welcome to another week and after weeks of events and what seems like a million meetings, we are looking forward to some much needed office time here at Cloud 9 Towers,  for a well deserved catch up. Admin beckons and whilst it's not sexy, meetings produce lots of follow up admin sometimes lead to even more meetings.

Meetings in business are necessary but can take an extraordinary amount of time, so how is best to deal with them? There are a millions blogs out there about meetings, funny ways to entertain yourself when sat in boring ones, or ways to look smart even if you haven't a clue about the content!

We did a little trawling and we thought we would share some of the best ones we found including the best way to appear smart - and make sure you have your phone calculator ready just in case someone says “About 25% of all users click on this button,” quickly chip in with, “So about 1 in 4,” and make a note of it. Everyone will nod their head in agreement, impressed and envious of your quick math skills.Easy percentages of course should be pretty easy to calculate as fractions but if you've forgotten your math - then the phone, discreetly used of course - could be a godsend.

The Guardian delivered a great article on 28 ways to make meetings more interesting and whilst we don't approve of all of them, some of them are just brilliant and begging to be tried. 

We love like the idea of drawing enormous genitalia on your notepad and discreetly show it to the person next to you for their approval. Hopefully any snickering will be kept to a minimum and you can concentrate on your next meeting task which is to give each person at the meeting just one biscuit with their refreshments and then systematically smash them with either your first or a ruler.

The idea of wearing a hands free phone headset throughout, and once in a while drifting  off into an unrelated conversation, such as: "I don't care if there are no dwarfs, just get the show done!" is also brilliant, as is writing  the words 'he fancies you' on your pad and showing it to the person next to you while indicating with your pen. 

Reconstruct the meeting in front of you using action figures and when anyone moves, re-arranging the figures accordingly is also a great idea as is drawing a chalk circle around one of the chairs, then avoid sitting on it when the meeting starts. 

But we think our favourite one of all is not using pointless and meaningless management speak such as  "When is this turkey going to be basted?" or "Let's keep this brook babbling" and its not announcing that you've run off some copies of the meeting agenda, then handing out pieces of paper that read: My secret agenda 1 Trample the weak 2 Triumph alone 3 Invade Poland - our utmost favourite has to be attempting to hypnotise the entire room using a pocket watch.

Who could possibly refuse you anything?!

So have a great week and we do hope you don't have to endure too many meetings!