Fun at meetings

If I were so inclined to engage in my own pet peeves three days in a row, I would have put "fun" in quotes for all the wrong reasons. (Yes, Brandon, I just saw your post.) Meetings are not fun. If they were fun, people would go to them on their off time for ... fun. Instead, people are paid to go to meetings. Think of that: the highest paying jobs in America involve sitting and doing nigh unto nothing. Doing nothing is the goal of most people, and yet doing nothing in meetings requires huge cash incentives.
In the military, we call our meetings briefs, but they are just as mind numbingly boring as I imagine the civilian type are. Yesterday, we had our weekly BUB, or battalion update brief, which is the longest meeting of the week. On a good week, I contribute 2 minutes out of the 2+ hours, and on a bad week I contribute 5. Another sign of a good BUB for Matthew is no tasking generated, especially since any tasking generated from 2-5 minutes of input is not usually well thought out tasking and is not worth spending my time on.
I have digressed. One less painful part of the BUB is when the Combat Stress Doctor says his little piece. Usually it is just a gentle reminder to the company commanders and first sergeants not to beat their troops. This week it was on the dangers of sleep deprivation, from which I am not suffering. He had a spiel on the dangers of not getting a full nights sleep, one of which was poor decision making and another of which was being emotionally unstable and mean. There was a moment of awkwardness when the Battalion Commander must have felt all eyes on him because he is often very direct and, in his defense, he gets very little sleep. He blurts out, "So you're saying I'd make better decisions if I got more sleep?" Now I feel for the good Dr. since he probably meant for commanders to convert this message to more sleep for the troops, but that is not how the BC took it. The people who answer more directly to the BC (especially the XO) had telepathically gotten a garbled message across to the BC, but meant to pass on that more sleep might make certain conversations more pleasant and less mean. The good doctor recovered nicely with a, "Why don't we give it a try and see how it works," which was the diplomacy you would expect from someone who deals all day with people from generation X crazed from combat.