Henrietta Hay's Column

One of the many advantages of retirement and aging - or any combination of the two - is that you can get out of doing most of the things you don't want to do. You figure that you have earned the right to pick and choose, and people expect you to be a little quirky anyway.

One of the things that I dislike more and more with each passing year is going to meetings. My friend the philosopher assures me that this is a universal dislike among humans of all ages, but she can't explain, nor can I, why we have so many of them. Let me hasten to assure you that I have nothing against organization meetings or business meetings or any other kind of meetings per se. It is simply that I personally prefer to skip most of them. They generally last too long and accomplish too little. Of course, occasionally, information is dispensed but it generally gets lost in all the verbiage. One wise soul commented that the length of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present. And the longer the meeting and the more people present, the less is actually accomplished. Queen Victoria understood the atmosphere when she commented that, "He (Mr. Gladstone) speaks to me as if I was a public meeting."

I'm sure that a lot of my dislike of meetings today is caused by my hearing loss. It is hard to be in a group and to hear only random words, just enough to get the gist of what is going on, without the subtleties. I have a general idea of what is being said, but often don't dare express an opinion because somebody else may have just said the same thing and I would look like a fool. Or even worse, my comment would have nothing at all to do with the subject actually being discussed, which would make me look like a worse fool. Not daring to express an opinion is for me a very serious problem. So I prefer to associate with people one on one.

On the other hand, maybe my attitude toward meetings has nothing at all to do with my hearing loss but rather with not wanting to squander time, which with each year becomes more precious. Of course, the hearing makes a wonderful, and honest, excuse for getting out of them.

There are several basic types of meetings. We have many wonderful organizations, fraternal, sisternal, religious, purely social. Their specific goals vary, but their meetings are mostly for human contact and support. Then there are business meetings, some of which are probably necessary. And there are all the others, which may be stimulating, educational, fun, informative, boring, or all of the above.

It was a major shock to me to discover that there are people who make their very profitable livings by arranging meetings for others. I recently read of an organization called Meeting Planners International, a professional organization with more than 10,500 members in 32 countries. Its president estimates that there are 40,000 professional planners in the U. S. Their job requirements include a college degree, good communications skills, an eye for detail and knowledge of the hospitality industry. I expect that the latter is especially important. The typical planner has a $2 million annual budget and organizes 16 meetings a year. Now that's a lot of planning for planning.

Meeting planning is a $56.6 billion industry in the United States. Last year more than 82 million delegates attended 260,000 meetings that ran an average of three days. Just for fun, I figured out that, based on a 40-hour week, there were about a billion working hours spent at meetings. And that doesn't include the plane rides or the social hours. One wonders what those people could have accomplished if they had stayed on the job. On the other hand, some things are better left uncontemplated.

There is something weird about the modern world where the art of communication covers everything from hand-written notes to sophisticated telecommunications, but which still requires endless meetings to handle the business of living. Makes you wonder what social skills were enhanced by meetings when civilization was just getting started. Or maybe meetings are a modern invention.

Sorry, I can't make that meeting today, but let me know what was decided. We'll talk it over one on one.