Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Ground Control to Major Tom

Today the Intellectual Property Counsel's Office had its Bi-Annual Report1 which included all the IP attorneys and support staff for the entire company (at least all the U.S. IP attorneys and staff). Most of this group was local to our office (I work at the company's HQ), but there was a small group that was coming in on a video-conferencing feed. For some reason not only could they see the speaker on their display, but they had set up a camera so we, the audience at Corporate HQ, could see them sitting around a conference table watching. This wouldn't have been that big a deal, but I noticed two things that distracted me from the presentation:
1) When the Big Boss Man was giving his opening speech and told a mildly-humorous joke, most of the audience at the HQ did that "Ha Ha" chuckle, and NO ONE at the remote location even cracked a smile.
2) There was one guy at the remote location who kept getting up, usually for more food.2 The best part was when he balled up his napkin and tried to shoot it, Kobe Bryant style3 into a garbage can that was off-frame, and completely missed... so he had to get up and through it away.

It got to the point where at any moment I expected one of the remote ladies to get up on top of their conference table and start doing a belly dance just to see if anyone (other than me) would have noticed. That would have been sweet.

1Or maybe it was the Semi-Annual Report... or was it the Every-Other-Seasonal Meeting...?
2Oh yeah, they provided awesome food for this thing... bagels and doughnut holes and fruit as far as the eye could see... as long as the eye could only see to the end of a long table.
3Without the rapes and *Bling Bling* spousal apologies.

1 Comments:

At 3:10 PM, Blogger biff said...

I used to work for a big company and we had closed circuit tv for building-wide meetings. The atmosphere in the managers' room--where they're broadcasting from--is very different from the room where I watched it. In general, the managers have a totally different attitude about their jobs than the rest of the staff.

 

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