This is a tough time indeed. A time for reflection, meditation and according to Trump a time for hydroxychloroquine. It’s also a time for us all to get a little team meeting cold turkey. You know, that favorite time of the day when we get to sit around a table together and listen to the boss bang endlessly on about the latest goals, objectives, tasks, chores, bores and any other company meeting mumbo jumbo designed to make hydroxychloroquine sound like, well, viagra. Let’s face it, we miss our team meetings. It’s the time of day when we get to genuinely switch off or sketch or cartoon or text each other with memes of boss-man in really scary positions. It made sharing weekend photos and naughty videos so much more appropriate knowing that they were pinged to each other under the table in blessed obscurity all while boss man/lady thought they were getting the better of us mere mortals by expounding the latest corporate mumbo jumbo techno garbage about just how crap we really are. It’s OK, we keep reminding ourselves, we already know how crap we are. Just sit in on one of our damned customer service calls!
Anyhoo, for those of you missing your all too regular fix of company/team meeting and finding that Zoom doesn’t quite hit the spot, we have a simple cure. The ‘daily family team meeting’ to survive the Coronavirus lockdown.
Here are a few rules to the daily family team meeting. 1. It has to be face to face. I know your teenage lovelies will think this a bit weird as they’ve never done anything face to face but tough. 2. EVERYONE has to attend and participate equally – no matter how young they are. You may as well teach toddler now. Even if all it achieves is to put the poor thing off meetings for life and stop them being boring as shit and joining Google one day. 3. Meet every day at the same time, probably in the morning – it’ll really kick the day off with a bang. 4. Think really hard before deciding who should lead the meeting. After all, this could be a unique chance for you to shun the ultimate in hospital passes and nail your partner to the meeting leader abuse wall. 5. Get one of your teens to take notes and then get them to circulate said notes – trust me it’s worth it to hear the daily excuses/whining/unrepenting abuse and read their sheer mastery of passive aggressive note taking. You never know, it might even be a handy tool for you one day. 6. Set key family objectives from the outset like ‘how you all chip in to help pay the rent – you too toddler!’ or ‘who wants to call gran today’ or ‘whoever keeps giving toddler the toilet brush as a chew toy better stop’.
The great thing about the family meeting is you have an instant punishment forum for any particularly bad behaviour. “Whoever just stuck baby Jane upside down in the toilet gets to do a full presentation tomorrow on household productivity stats and recommendations including time spent on said toilet per family member plus peak Netflix utilisation by hour and minute. We expect detailed data and cost/benefit analysis, graphing and trend extrapolation.” Trust me this beats any Guantanamo waterboarding.
And to get you all revved up here’s a miniature snapshot of our daily family team meeting from this morning. “So Dad, (like a friggin muppet I didn’t follow rule 4.) your problemo if I’m a bit noisy this morning but I didn’t get a chance to make my mochachino yet as you didn’t wake me up in time for this damned meetup thingy so I’ll be mixin’ it while you bang on. And that task you gave me last time – sorry what was it again and why should I give a damn in the first place. Oh and someone scream out loud when it’s my turn to bang on about God only knows what as I’ll be headset on till then to drown out the mochachino mixing clatter. Back to you Dad, sorry er bossy/chairmany/lame father thing.”
Oh Christ, where’s that link to Zoom?
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Philip Letts 