New Rant Thread

[Vacumatic]

All the amateurs raised this as a concern when we were told that 2030 would be the cut off for fossil fueled new cars, the industry experts tried to reassure us, 'plenty of capacity'.

Six years away, petrol cars are being scrapped and replaced by electric power, at least in part.

Four years ago I met an electrical engineer from HMT, a consortium of Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, his view was that electric generation was still 20 years away from delivering a reliable product that didn't have a 1000 year liability.

 

[R181]

I sure do. Seems our rush into electrification of everything is more virtue signalling than well thought out public policy.

I don't know if I'd call it virtue signalling per se but rather a poorly planned and uncoordinated public policy. As Robbie Burns said, "the best laid plans of men and mice gang aft agley". Alternately, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".

Bob

 

[Rufusdog]

I don't know if I'd call it virtue signalling per se but rather a poorly planned and uncoordinated public policy. As Robbie Burns said, "the best laid plans of men and mice gang aft agley". Alternately, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".

Bob

It’s definitely poorly planned and uncoordinated public policy (so what’s new). But that’s due to the rush to appear to be doing something (anything) following the virtue signalling. Unfortunately this is all too common with the political class these days. The planning horizon for the vast majority of politicians does not extend beyond the next election or the end of their nose, whichever is shorter. The garnering of votes clearly supersedes the public good, but that’s not new.

 

[Chris]

Canned laughter on TV comedies, whose wretched idea was it? I’m glad that it now seems finally to be going away but I know when something's funny, I don’t need or want recorded guffaws to point it out for me. It’s annoying and patronising in equal measure.

 

[Northam Saint]

Don’t you just hate pointless meeting full of people who just like the sound of their own voices. Just sat through an hour of complete and utter bullshit ! Not one single uttered word had a single thing to do with me !!

 

[Vacumatic]

Don’t you just hate pointless meeting full of people who just like the sound of their own voices. Just sat through an hour of complete and utter bullshit ! Not one single uttered word had a single thing to do with me !!

There was a training film starring John Cleese called Meetings Bloody Meetings which dealt with this very subject.

My bugbear was meetings where people turned up with food for their lunch, laptops, turned up late and so on.

 

[chazt]

We have a friend, Amy, who is a compulsive talker. She just talks. Constantly. Sometimes I just want to put my hand over her mouth and snarl, “shut. up.” My code name for her is in American Sign Language.

 

[Rufusdog]

Don’t you just hate pointless meeting full of people who just like the sound of their own voices. Just sat through an hour of complete and utter bullshit ! Not one single uttered word had a single thing to do with me !!

Unfortunately, this is also true for meetings at the executive level. But, the worst offenders I found were in the government. I worked for a Crown Corporation (and thus was not a member of the Civil Service) for several years and had to sit on several government inter-departmental committees on a range of matters somewhat related to my actual job. What astonished me the most was that majority of the government committee members had no other job than to sit on committees. A few of us, however, had full-time jobs running departments/ sections/regions and our committee work was incidental to our ‘real jobs’. Needless to say, our objective for a meeting was to get through it as quickly as practicable, whereas the others were quite happy to move through meetings at a leisurely pace and sometimes to just chew the fat.

 

[Northam Saint]

I was sat there thinking shut the f@#% up. I am going to ask my manager if I really do need to go. I wouldn‘t mind if there was anything constructive for me, but it’s just blah blah blah !

 

[Twelvefret]

Think of it as just one of those things you have to do to keep your job. Being unemployed provides endless opportunities for not having to attend meetings.

 

[Vacumatic]

I was sat there thinking shut the f@#% up. I am going to ask my manager if I really do need to go. I wouldn‘t mind if there was anything constructive for me, but it’s just blah blah blah !

There is more than one way of looking at this, I can understand your position of 'this is a waste of time'.

Some organisations have some very outmoded ideas and work on the basis of the more the merrier and also we shouldn't leave them out because they are a certain level in the company.

Kluwers set it out very well in this piece

Do you really need to attend this meeting? Five questions to ask yourself to decide | Wolters Kluwer

If your organisation hasn't bought into this thinking then you have to decide if you want to be a pioneer.

 

[Northam Saint]

There is more than one way of looking at this, I can understand your position of 'this is a waste of time'.

Some organisations have some very outmoded ideas and work on the basis of the more the merrier and also we shouldn't leave them out because they are a certain level in the company.

Kluwers set it out very well in this piece

Do you really need to attend this meeting? Five questions to ask yourself to decide | Wolters Kluwer

If your organisation hasn't bought into this thinking then you have to decide if you want to be a pioneer.

It was all really a case of I could spend the time on more focussed student activity. I will take a look at that later, cheers.

 

[chazt]

I was sat there thinking shut the f@#% up. I am going to ask my manager if I really do need to go. I wouldn‘t mind if there was anything constructive for me, but it’s just blah blah blah !

I used to attend monthly Speech department meetings with my clinical supervisor and some 50+ other therapists in my district. When leaving my school to attend, I’d always check in with the principal to let her know I was leaving the building. Our conversation generally went something like this, “I’m leaving for my meeting now.“ Her rejoinder was, “Do you want to stick needles in your eyes before you go, or just use them to prop open your eyelids when you get there?”

 

[Paper Plane]

“And do you have your Buzz Word Bingo card with you?”

steve

 

[Twelvefret]

Well, my background was in medical sales. Management was never an interest. I wanted to be where the product or service was going to be used. My experience with managers was that they got into management because they disliked customers or end users. They sought further advancement because they tired of managing salespeople. When they were comfortably uninvolved and in upper management, suddenly that were endowed with the knowledge and skill for how a salesperson should do their job and never missed an opportunity to let us know.