Steer Well Clear of all Meetings - Part #2
11 Don't drink under the influence of work
Alcohol and business don't mix, which is why you really shouldn't bother with work if you like a drink. Excessive drinking at work makes you feel sociable, light-headed and confident. In other words, it makes you feel like you work in sales. The day after, when you feel like the whole world is a grim, head-crushing torture chamber, it makes you feel like you work in IT.
It's an absolute rule that the person who earns least in the office will be the first person to buy a round after work. He is also the first to get absolutely hammered and say something so offensive that he gets passed over for a raise for the seventh year running.
12 Dress up not down
Since the collapse of communism, dress-down Fridays have done more than anything else to impair the smooth running of capitalism. Business suits are for doing business in. If you are wearing a welder's helmet people expect rivets, if you are wearing a suit people expect business. But if you are wearing shorts and sandals, people expect you to be on your way to San Francisco with flowers in your hair. On the other hand, never look too businesslike. This marks you out as someone who works in organised crime or as an undertaker, if not both.
13 Never answer a phone
Answering a phone in an office generally means speaking to a customer or your boss. As neither will call unless they want something, answering the phone will probably mean doing work. Don't pick up a phone unless you know it's a social call. As you will never know whether an incoming call is social or not, it's best to make a lot of pre-emptive outgoing social calls.
Managers always get terribly upset about unanswered calls and pretend it could have been someone offering millions of pounds of new business. You know that is very unlikely because you have just had someone on the phone offering millions of pounds of new business and been so rude to him that he rang off.
14 Cycle to work
Office car parks are all built to a rigid standard which requires that they have 30% fewer spaces than cars. The reason why bosses get to work first is because they have such huge cars that they can only park them if they arrive first and can drive straight in without any reversing and manoeuvring. It's left to the Micra-driving minions to squeeze into the tiny little gaps senior management leaves behind. If you use reverse gear more than 18 times to get into a space, you probably shouldn't be parking there. Remember, it's no good sitting there in the world's smallest gap feeling all pleased with yourself if you can't open the door.
15 Refuse to go to conferences
Conferences are the business equivalent of going for a curry, in that everyone thinks having one is a fantastic idea, but you always end up drinking too much, talking rubbish and feeling sick for days afterwards. The biggest fear in the business world is having to make a speech at a conference. This is because you generally have nothing of interest to say and no one in the audience has the slightest interest in anything you have to say anyway. For example, when you are the IT director, it's your job to make sure the IT works. If it does work they know already and if it doesn't, they don't want to hear your pathetic excuses.
16 Ignore consultants
A consultant is someone in business with an ego so large it takes more than one company to support it. At a personal level, consultants work either by trying to inspire fear or trying to be friends. It's in trying to be friends with you that they inspire the most fear. The acid test of a consultant is whether they can say, "Everything's fine, we'll be off then." No real consultant can. Instead they will sell you a project that costs just enough to keep your profits suppressed to a level that requires further remedial consultancy.
17 Find the right person
Everyone in the office is the right person for something. They have the experience, the programme, the form, the docket, the knowledge or the key to make something happen in the easiest manner possible. But when somebody else wants to do this particular thing the last person in the universe they will ask is the right person. Instead they reinvent the wheel, take their driving test and do a couple of horrific crash tests. In this way everyone has to learn to do everything from scratch. That is what they mean when they talk about a learning organisation.
18 Leave networking to trawlermen
The old school tie used to be the fan belt of British manufacturing industry, which explains why we no longer have one. However, in business they still say it's not what you know, it's who you know, which is a bit depressing when you have just completed 15 years of formal education.
Networkers give you their card within the first 30 seconds of conversation.
After about 20 minutes telling you how brilliant they are, ask whether they would like your card. Then return their own to them and watch them slip it straight back into their pocket.
19 Learn to recycle reports
Reports are the office equivalent of cones in the road. They are not actually work themselves but they are a big, clear sign that real work might be done at some stage. In the meantime, they slow everything down and cause anger and annoyance all round. The quickest and easiest way to write a report is to change the names in the last report. When you do this, be aware that there will always be one name that escapes your changes and that will be in the sentence, "We are committed to personal service to ..." The other thing people always forget to change in reports are the headers and footers which you only notice are completely wrong in the lift on the way to your presentation.
20 Steer well clear of all meetings
Half of every working day is spent in meetings, half of which are not worth having, and of those that are, half the time is wasted. Which means that nearly one third of office life is spent in small rooms with people you don't like, doing things that don't matter. The only reason people have so many meetings is that they are the one time you can get away from your work, your phone and your customers. People say that the secret of a good meeting is preparation. But if people really prepared for meetings, the first thing they would realise is that most are unnecessary. In fact, a tightly run meeting is one of the most frightening things in office life. These are meetings for which you have to prepare, in which you have to work and after which you have to take action. Fortunately, these meetings are as rare as a sense of gay abandon in the finance department.
Office Politics: How Work Really Works by Guy Browning is published by Ebury Press.
CHUM - Houston's SCUBA Club is the sponsor of the 
