Business as usual - Volume 1
Communication. The only real reason humanity wasn't wiped out millennia ago by some catastrophic event (like a flock of doves flying overhead) is because we have a guardian angel. Communication. If it were not for not for someone shouting "Watch out!" our forefathers could have easily walked off a cliff and plummeted to their untimely (and wholly unnecessary) demise. Thanks to those handy road sign things, I may never have to find out what it's like to unsuspectingly drive into incoming traffic. Communication is like the hardhat of mankind. Fact Fiction Fact.
Human communication, like electronic communication, has a bandwidth, some forms have significantly more bandwidth available for use and some less so. To draw a comparison, communicating via email is rather a lot like trying to get a spade down your throat: pointless and painful. Communicating via telephone is a step up from email but is still like a midget giving birth to a dinosaur. These things are just hard to do, it's hard to communicate even a vague idea of your meaning in words. It's not that you just need to think a little bit harder or put some more effort in, no, these are hard things to do. Some people spend years getting university degrees in communication just so that they can really convey what they mean over low-bandwidth mediums; you know, things like "So what do you want changed?" "Can you make the text purple instead of black?" I mean, I'm certainly no expert on this and there are probably a thousand things wrong with those sentences. So what now? Are we doomed to never communicate at our full potential? No, there is a divine solution. Meetings.
Meetings are great, the face to face kind, they're high-bandwidth crackdens Edens. You can do all sorts of fancy high-bandwidth things that you just can't do over email or the phone, things like waving your hands or tapping your pen on the desk. These things are important because they really communicate your motives, they're like the Plaster of Paris for language. The next time you really screw up your sentence, try waving your hands a bit, raising your eyebrows or winking; suddenly, and I like to call it magic, those looks of absolute confusion will turn into looks of zen-like understanding. Meetings practically obsolete email and telephone conversations, just think: a waste of time activity probably thousands of years old is obsoleting modern day technology! Rather phenomenal stuff!
All in all, nothing says "I'm a bonehead businessman" like a meeting (almost) half a state away.
