“How can we manifest that as a problem?”

An actual quote from an actual meeting! Basically, we were reviewing how successfully or unsucessfully some year-end process went. I'll spare you the details, but the person in charge of this ninety-minute craptastrophe had to keep reminding us that we were there to bring attention to problems we ran into, rather than trying to provide solutions to these problems. It was an open forum, and whenever someone mentioned a problem she would have to distill it down to something she could fit onto one of those giant Post-It pads. Thing is, she didn't understand much of what anyone was talking about. So there were a lot of clarification breaks.

Not only that, but after she had finished scrawling down all of the "problems" we had to vote on which were the most severe. She assigned a number to each one and we were given ten votes that we could scatter around. (I'm not explaining this well, but my head is starting to hurt… again.) Rather than go back to our desks, put the votes into an email and send that shit off to her, for each topic (like forty) she went around and counted hands. Then, someone had to keep a record of how many votes each problem received, and then turn that into some kind of spreadsheet or whatever. Which I guess is easier than copying and pasting from a bunch of emails and giving everyone in the room a half hour in which to do actual work. I mean, that would be my guess if, say, I kept shitting in my own pants. Because seriously, I'd have bigger things to worry about then. But only then.