Surviving Meetings: The Limerick Challenge

Originally posted 2010-03-23 16:24:39

An unknown author penned a self-describing limerick (meta-limerick?) that perhaps represents the pinnacle of its genre:

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
In space that is quite economical,
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean,
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

You can read more about limericks here.

Isaac Asimov, who wrote about almost anything you can think of, published a series of short stories, across several volumes, about a men’s group who called themselves The Black Widowers. These men dined, discussed, dissected, and divined the answer to some puzzle in each story. The stories are quite good, and I recommend them heartily. In a few stories, until an editor convinced Asimov otherwise, one of the characters delivered a limerick summarizing a book of Homer’s The Iliad (or was it The Odyssey?).

This brings me to my dilemma: paying attention in business meetings. They often bore me, but I usually need to stay engaged and I always need to disguise my ennui. I have launched a personal campaign to summarize the gist of each meeting I attend in a limerick, while the meeting transpires. This feeds my brain while keeping me alert–after all, I have to know what’s happening in the meeting to properly summarize (and mock) it. The internal nature of the content of these limericks (company material), combined with the snarky tone that limericks require, prevents me from publishing most of them beyond my humble notebook. Here, though is an example that I wrote during a meeting with other development managers. This meeting discussed resource allocation, and since my current projects blessedly are of highest priority, I spent the meeting plucking the prime developers from other managers. They spent the meeting protesting. I wrote:

Don’t whine, do not cry, do not sob.
If your people are doing their job,
And being outstanding,
It’s our understanding
We’ll move them to underneath Rob.

Take the limerick challenge!