Hypothetically, this might be a good time to upgrade your home theatre system.

Because I am still far too mature and dignified to blog about the idiosyncrasies of my job, I’d like to stress that I was HYPOTHETICALLY not thrilled when my boss turned to me last week and said, “I think you should attend our customer service meetings, so you know what’s going on with the products.”

As has been previously established, I do not do well in meetings. After five years of employment in a number of different industries and fields, I have reached a degree of peace with this fact. After all, I have plenty of marketable skills; I simply lack whatever it is that makes people capable of sitting in a conference room for an hour or more while maintaining perfect focus on the subject at hand and never allowing their minds to derail into the contemplation of other topics like, say, what sort of pubic hairstyles all their coworkers are sporting.

...Uh, hypothetically.

I admit nothing.

So I didn’t have high hopes for this morning’s meeting. At best, I figured, I would be able to concentrate on the first five minutes of proceedings and feign believable interest for the other 55. Irresponsible, yeah, but at least I know my own limits. Five minutes later, I had struggled my way through the preliminary discussion – about reorganizing the service system, analyzing the issues, and giving each problem a priority number of 1 (extremely fucking urgent) through 5 (eh, we’ll get around to it) – and was on the verge of mental checkout when the meeting manager turned to the first issue at hand.

“So,” he said, “This is an issue with product number TTF2298. As you can see, there have been four more reports of the unit’s battery overheating and becoming combustible. And as you all know, this is in addition to the five previous incidents of this type that we already knew about.”

Around the table, everyone nodded and made affirmative noises.

“So now,” the manager continued, “We’ll just need to assign a priority to this item.”
“Hmm,” everyone said.
“Is this a new product?” someone asked.
“No, we're not selling it anymore, but it’s in the field,” said the marketing manager.
“Ahh,” the person replied.

And then he said, “Okay, let’s make this priority level three.”



On one hand, I am pleasantly surprised to find that I am, in fact, capable of paying attention during meetings.

On the other, I now know that I am working for people who don't think it of particularly pressing importance that one of our products is spontaneously catching fire.