1. Taking phone messages for people who are in meetings, and
2. Going to meetings.

The first meeting ever held was in the Mezzanine Era. In those days, the job of humans was to slay prey, bring it home, and figure out how to cook it. The problem was humans were slow and basically naked, whereas the prey had warm fur and could run like an antelope; in fact, it was an antelope, only back then nobody knew this. At last, someone said, "Maybe if we just sat down and did some Brainstorming, we could come up with a better way to hunt our prey!" It went extremely well, plus it was much warmer sitting in a circle, so they agreed to meet again the next day, and the next.

But it was pointed out that, prey-wise, the humans had not produced anything, and the race was pretty much starving. This was a serious point so the humans put it right near the top of their Agenda! At which point, some of the people in the meeting, who were primitive but not stupid, started eating plants. Thus was born modern agriculture. It could never have happened without meetings.

The modern business meeting, however, might be better compared with a funeral, in the sense that you have a gathering of people who are wearing uncomfortable clothing and would rather be elsewhere. The major difference is that most funerals have a definite purpose. Also, nothing is ever really buried in a meeting.

An idea may look dead, but it will always reappear at another meeting later on. If you have ever seen the movie "Night of the Living Dead" you have a rough idea of how modern meetings operate, with projects and proposals that everybody thought were killed rising constantly from their graves to stagger back into meetings to eat the brains of the living.

There are two major kinds of meetings:

1. Meetings that are held for tradition. For example, a lot of managerial meetings fall into this category. You'll get used to this kind of meeting. You'd better, because this kind accounts for 83% of all meetings (based on a study in which I wrote down numbers until one of them looked about right). This type of meeting operates the way "Show and Tell" does in nursery school, with everybody getting to say something, the difference being that in nursery school kids actually have something new to say. When it's your turn, you should say you're still working on whatever it is you're supposed to be working on. This may seem dumb, since obviously you'd be working on whatever you're supposed to be working on, and even if you weren't, you'd claim you were, but this is the traditional thing for everyone to say. It would be a lot faster if the person running the meeting would just say, "Everybody who is still working on what he or she is supposed to be working on raise your hand!" You'd be out of there in five minutes, even allowing time for jokes. But this is not how we do it in America. My guess is, it's how they do it in Japan.
   
   
2. Meetings where there is some alleged purpose. These are trickier, because what you do depends on what the purpose is. Sometimes, the purpose is harmless, like somebody wants to show slides of pie charts and give everybody a copy of a big fat report. All you have to do in this kind of meeting is sit there and have elaborate fantasies, then take the report back to your office and throw it away, unless of course you're a vice president, in which case you write the name of a subordinate in the upper right hand corner, followed by a question mark, like this: "Pat?" Then you send it to Pat and forget all about it (although it will plague Pat throughout the following weeks and months).

Another is to have an accomplice interrupt the meeting and announce that you have a phone call from somebody very important, such as the president of the company, or the pope. It should be either one or the other. It would sound fishy if the accomplice said, "You have a call from the president of the company. Or the pope."

You should know how to take notes at a meeting. Use a yellow legal pad. At the top, write the date and underline it twice. Now wait until an important person such as your boss starts talking. When s/he does, assume an expression of rapt interest, as though the secrets of life itself were being revealed. Then draw interlocking rectangles on the legal pad. If it is an especially lengthy meeting, you may draw more elaborate doodles and a caricature of your boss.

If somebody falls asleep in a meeting, have everybody else leave the room. Then collect a group of total strangers right off the street and have them sit around the sleeping person until s/he awakens. Then have one of them say, in a very somber voice, "Terry, your plan is very, very risky. However, you've given us no choice but to try it. I only hope for your sake, that you know what you're getting yourself into." Then they should all file quietly from the room.