Mine Host is the chairman of a (very minor) government sponsored liquor industry advisory group.
This involves little more than meeting now & again to eat sandwiches,
....and to discuss violence & matters of public disorder.
The membership is top heavy with public servants, most of them in "care bear" type roles.
Result;
1/. Talk is being presented as Results. A non-tangible (speech) being presented as a tangible outcome. This is new territory for Mine Host.
2/. People who matter, the liquor licencees, have grown tired of turning up only to listen to droning.
However, despite lack of interest (except from public servants, who seemingly have no objection to either free sandwiches or to wasting time on unproductive stuff) there is still the occassional meeting, notable more for the comical aspects than for anything else;
1/. The public servant taking the "minutes" has no idea how to keep minutes of a meeting. However they do manage to sanitise what passes for minutes to remove anything controversial, or that will reflect less than positively upon the meeting (this they don't stuff up).
2/. Lots of these public service types, who seem to do little more than wear a tie & look dour, will occassionally call Mine Host "the chair".
Every single time this happens, I get off the chair & hold it up where it can be seen.
....They have long since learned to stop referring to me as "chairperson". They prefer to avoid confrontation.
I know my native language. A chair is what people sit on. The chairman is the role they voted me into. The correct form of address is "Mr. Chairman" (or if a lady: "Madam Chairman")
They spend all their careers absorbed in a world where procedure matters more than outcome, & they don't even know basic meeting protocol?
2 comments:
Lesson one in running meetings - always take the minutes. He who controls the minutes, controls the outcomes.
Give the public servant doing that role the boot and do it yourself, or get a mate to do it. Just don't let the pubes do it.
BOAB, The (cough) secretary is an elected position, bit hard to just knock her flat & take over the job myself.
In a later post I'll reveal how the situation was dealt with!
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