Martini with three pencils, please

I just got out of a three-pencil meeting. For the uninitiated, a three-pencil meeting is a meeting so full of bureaucracy, so laden with buzzwords, so offensively boring that one is tempted to stick a pencil through one's neck. It is a crazy-making meeting with 15 people stuck in frozen places in their ill-fitting chairs that sound like they're farting whenever you cross your legs, where three managers (oops, "team leaders") drone on and on about granularity, and widget counts, and metrics, and Gaaahdd-awful phrases like "closing the loop" and "quantitative process improvement" until I had to physically restrain myself -- I felt an insane urge come over me to suddenly yank up my leg and start chewing off my toenails. I wondered if this would stop the meeting, or if anybody would notice.

Between bouts of insanity I was falling asleep. I thought I might have to start barking to wake myself up, but then I kept hearing the perky blonde talking about productivity improvements and my eyes immediately crossed into glazed, stupefying catatonia. They make drugs for what I was feeling, in fact they make them at this very place I work, but dear Jesus they need to make some sort of time-released drug for people who have to attend meetings. There is a reason people go postal, and it's called PERKINESS!!

What kind of a person likes meetings? What awful genetic code makes people drool with anticipation of being stuffed into a cold room with a huge plastic table where they cheerily fire up their 347-slide Powerpoint presentation and proceed to read every fucking word to you as if you are too stupid to put together the alphabet into recognizable words without their benevolent guidance? Huh?

Let me tell you. They are former cheerleaders! That's gotta be the secret. Take away the pompoms and the Friday night football games and these people droop like old bologna. I once attended a women's executive club meeting where our speaker was a ridiculously perky, thin, blonde woman (a former cheerleader!) in a very nicely tailored navy suit who proceeded to talk about her love of public speaking. She actually stood up at the podium and said in her perky cheerleader voice, "Whenever I'm really bummed, I know that I have to get up in front of a big group of people and talk? And eat lots and lots of M&M's? Because that's the only thing that really gets my energies going?" It occurred to me that she was trying to give the group actual advice on how to get out of the doldrums by speaking in public, but I was too busy thinking about how much better it would be if someone flayed the skin on my upper arms and ground red pepper in it while playing Lawrence Welk's polka version of "Onward Christian Soldiers." They didn't serve alcohol at those club meetings, so I quit going.

Martini, please. I'm going to work on my productivity improvement matrix at the bar.