My new job involves taking part in a few conference calls each week, with most of the participants being from another country. Talk about two peoples separated by a common language. Everyone on the calls are native English speakers, but each call produces enough confusion for me to think that we'd be better off talking to Koreans via a translator.
My main complaint is that no one appears to have been trained in how to behave during a conference call. Or how to speak clearly.
We had an example last week where one bloke screamed out in the middle of a call that if someone else got a task finished for him quickly that he'd take him to a strip club for a lap dance. That caused one bloke to drop out of the call in a hurry, since he was obviously taking the call from home and you could hear his kids in the background. Mr scream-stupid-things-out-loud should have been taken outside and shot, but nothing happened.
I had another call this week where one bloke joined the call (late) and immediately the conversation moved to discussion of a sporting event that half the participants had no interest in. Several minutes were consumed in discussing this event - I presume that the other blokes on my end of the call were sitting at their desks giving their telephones a puzzled look. Why would anyone want to waste time with this sort of crap?
Our calls have no chairman to keep them in line, which is half the problem. We don't have a management structure - we have an anarchy. I don't mind too much if I have a good headset and no one coming around and bugging me, but today I did not have a headset and I was frantically trying to take notes whilst being interrupted at my desk. I was approaching that point where you put your phone on mute and scream out "will you stupid fuckers get on with it", except that my phone did not have a mute button either. I really don't trust the mute button either - I just reckon it is better to bottle it up and not say anything stupid out loud (if you can help it).
Doing conference calls at work has complete ruined any enjoyment that I might have gotten out of watching 24. I watch those guys go into crisis mode where they are all conferencing in from halfway around the planet, and I have to laugh. People don't talk over the top of each other, try to tell inappropriate jokes or apologise because their wife is putting the kids to bed in the background. Decisions are made in 24, whilst they never seem to be made in the real world.
How can people watch so much TV, but get so little out of it that can be applied back in the real world?
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