From: "Adam Flinton" 

http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2002/1218.cocoon3_p.html

Note it's not meant to be humourous & would only be humourous to a
consultant like myself but.....the first part re dealing with customers
makes me laugh....the one thing missing was the ability of the outsiders to
"contribute" to the noise in the signal to noise ratio of a given
meeting.....

A good example was in a meeting with the Swedish customers where we
discovered a common European bond....

Meeting progressing about how the cust thought about items (things you sell)
& how stuff was stored now & how we should move towards stage 1
implementation. I deal with the nuts & bolts of making stuff talk to
other stuff (i.e. the how) whereas our "Data Architect" (i.e. the
what & the when) is a German who is the only truely stereotypical
German I know.

He was endeavouring to pull everyone into incredibly small details where
what was required was more "we store this info in this system running
on this & it's stored like this & is accesible like this & can
be accessed like this at these times (for data dumping), we store this info
on this system..." etc.

Bizarrely this person was endeavouring to point out how it should be stored
which was beyond irrelevant because it wasn't......so........curious
glances all round after the ninth or tenth such "intervention"
followed by the Swedish big cheese looking at me & my 2 Dutch collegues
with a kind of "Is he yours?" expression followed by "You
know  ...this is why we don't like the Germans..."
Followed by my Dutch collegue noting how that emotion/thought pattern must
be the basis for the EU .

The best part though is the late afternoon meeting where the relevant cust
"DM" (decision maker) is absent & conversations just go round
in circles with people making "action points" which are to raise
the same points when the "DM is present" . "At this point Mr
Flinton raised the point wrt to why the DM had called the meeting knowing
he would not be present & that no decisions could be taken in his
abscence....the meeting then discussed general philosophical ideas
concerning human existence..." .

That & previously unknown "business representatives" suddenly
deciding they must be involved & start wondering why we are using 220
volts & not 110.....to power the machines (only a slight exaggeration).

The worst part is struggling to stay awake when you're entirely superfluous
to the meeting but must be present because you were on the cc list &
didn't mail them back in time to say that you are not required.....&
then having to justify text messaging as the framework which was agreed 8
months ago vs tying paper messages to the legs of pigeons.

I do find it amusing to find it's the same everywhere.....I always remember
while on a different project (in a different country) one person stating up
front in a meeting "We must keep politics out of this & just stick
to what is required".... as a political point 

Adam

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