Big office building

I work in a big office building, and the one thing that people will always tell you about big office building: trends reach epidemic proportions. If you work with five to ten people, I fad passes in 1 week, or two weeks tops. But in an office with 65 people just in the main department, like we have, you can be stuck as a helpless thrall to the latest management craze for six months to a year, or even more.

Eight months ago, the boss installed portable projection screens in every major conference room in the building. That is five conference rooms in all, because if there is one thing about the board, it is that they love meetings. A few months after that, the smaller ?discussion rooms? were similarly outfitted with portable projection screens. Apparently, according to the latest conference which inspired a whole series of nauseating and insufferable memos and pep talks, the key to increased employee productivity is an ?immersive environment.? Apparently, portable projection screens and fancy graphics are what is meant by ?immersive?.

So fine. I am paid to attend meetings, and boring as they are, I don't mind sitting through them knowing that they furnish a break from my daily tasks. If he wants to immerse me in fancy presentations on his new portable projection screens, which would be more easily digested on xerox copies, that is just fine with me. But the boss is one to make sure that he gets his monies worth. That means that we all have to prepare weekly presentations for these pull-down projector screens.

I wasn't hired for this. I was hired because I have an uncanny ability to organize information. I have maintained a flawless database for six years running now, and during the computer crash of '93, I was able to recover most of the facts from my own head days before they were able to get the system back online. If they want to numb my brain with clip art and 3d graphs, that's fine, but I shouldn't have to do the same pointless junk on their portable projection screens. My mind doesn't work that way. It works better than that. I can understand what is going on without three dimensional pie charts to explain everything to me like I was 5 years old. I wish they'd have done with their portable projection screens so I actually had time to do my job again.