A waste of an hour

Last week I got a call from an editor at the textbook company I freelance for asking me about my work availability after the new year. I told her that I'd be available in February when the 14-month project I've been working on is finished up. So she scheduled a meeting this morning for all the freelancers who might be working on the project. I couldn't attend the meeting because two of my three kids were at home this morning, so I conferenced in by phone.

And it turned out to be a waste of an hour. The freelancers who were at the meeting had a whole sheaf of papers with examples of the work we'd be doing, but the other person conferencing in and I didn't have those papers, so we couldn't see what they were talking about. The freelancers who were there, asked four million questions about all the examples, which meant nothing to me because I couldn't see what they were talking about.

So while the the questions and answers were going on, I read the news online - Britney Spears's 16-year-old sister is pregnant, hee, hee - and giggled at MadMad's post. Unfortunately, while I was giggling the phone wasn't on mute. Whoops. I blamed it on my kids.

The bottom line was that at the end of the hour of listening, I still had really no idea of what the work will entail or when we'll be doing it. What a waste of precious work time.

Meetings are pointless; meetings by conference call are even more so.