Teleconferences: A Mind Numbing Experience

I have come to think that the best way to kill any creativity and production is to link a group of creative people together via a teleconference and ask them to produce something. Not quite unlike the mysterious chemical in turkey that makes me near comatose every Thanksgiving, the droning sound of a cacophony of voices being emitted over a speakerphone shuts down half my brain and puts me to sleep.

Such was the state of affairs last night as I sat through an hour long teleconference between my head office over here and several different offices in the states. It didn’t help matters much that the teleconference started at 8 o’clock at night our time (all the more convenient for those in the States that were just shaking off the dust from their weekend.)

The goal of this teleconference was for my front office to present a slide show consisting of 24 slides. No sooner had we turned to slide 3 than the entire transatlantic conversation was taken out of our control and we became blind spectators to an endless verbal quagmire between faceless voices. The only thing worse than sitting in a room and watching several people argue amongst themselves is sitting in a room and listening to several people argue amongst themselves and not being able to see them.

The biggest issue at hand (and out of our hands) was the specific wording of a specific document that no one had yet laid their specific eyes on. The debate over whether to use the word “delegate” or “designate” in this memorandum took on all the resemblances of a well crafted haiku. I’m sure that there was an answer out there someplace but it was just beyond our ability to reach, making us all ponder on our place in the universe.

The conversations came became derailed at the slightest absence of clarification and quite frankly, no one on my end of the world cared enough to interject their opinion. The best we could hope to do was pay attention enough to react if any of our names were called out.

If Alexander Graham Bell had uttered his famous line, “Watson, come here, I need you”, via a teleconference, I am quite sure that Watson would have been so bored at that point that the urgency of Bell’s request would have escaped him. (A half hour later, Watson would walk over the Bell and asked, “Hey Alexander, is that an acid stain on your pants, or were you just happy to see me?”)

After 45 minutes of the hour long event, we had managed to reach slide #8 and my front office people were desperately trying to make a point or two before we reached our time limit. This only initiated another exchange of views erupting from the speaker and again everyone in the room with me was adrift in an apathetic sea of monotony.

The only voice that was heard clearly was the automated voice that declared, “This teleconference will be disconnected in 5 minutes.”

That we all heard perfectly clear.