Excessive deliberation. Beating around the bush. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Whatever you want to say, this day has been full of it. Yesterday was pretty hectic, but a lot got accomplished. But today…well, today I found myself scurrying from one impromptu meeting to the next, and everywhere I went, I got an earful about some issue that I cannot believe anybody was seriously agonizing over.

In my business, we design web-based applications. Rather than go from a business requirement phase to a prototype/design phase to an engineering phase, we do different pieces of it all over the map. An engineer might actually design, write copy for, and build one piece of the site, all without my knowing it, while the next day I might be asked to prototype a different piece of the site. Naturally, when the whole thing gets put together, it looks like a patchwork quilt. But I won’t go into that right now.

Eventually, during the course of all this, somebody at our company always gets it in their head that we need to change something. Some piece of text, maybe. Or this box here doesn’t look right. When that occurred today, the result was a ridiculous meeting of two engineers, myself, and the CEO of the company. We all spent half an hour waving our arms around, shouting out stuff like we were playing Win, Lose or Draw, and generally splitting the tiniest, thinnest hairs you can imagine over whether a box should say “This is your invoice” or just “Invoice.”

Scratch papers are pulled out. One courageous fellow always tries to start taking notes, but eventually either the rest of the group will double-back upon their own ideas so many times that the notion becomes impossible, or the CEO will actually snatch the pen and paper away and try to make his own notes, but only write down half of what he’s thinking, so that the complete thought cannot ever be reconstructed from the chicken-scratch. Another fellow who’s losing his patience will eventually start asking questions of the other engineers like, “So, you know what to do, right guys?” in an attempt to end this torture, when it’s painfully obvious that none of us has the slightest idea what the fuck is going on.

What’s worst, though, is the way in which every single blessed one of these sessions ends. The CEO always just gets up and walks off when he reaches the arbitrary point at which he doesn’t want to discuss it anymore. This always occurs after he has given us a whole slew of crazy, half-baked directions in ridiculous random patterns, but before he has explained them through to their conclusion. So after he leaves the rest of us will then search our brains and realize that hey, we don’t have a complete idea of what we’re doing yet! But it will be too late. So then everyone will usually decide that hey, we didn’t really end up changing too much, did we? Actually, did we change anything? (In the course of these discussions, usually everyone will decide they hate the page as it looks now, then they love it, then they hate it again…ad infinitum.) By the time it’s over, we’re all so thoroughly confused, we haven’t got a clue where to begin…or if we even should.

So I wasted a good portion of my day on several independent meetings like this today. It’s quite humbling, when you get involved in one of these discussions, just how powerless you are to direct its outcome. You could even stomp your foot and say, “All right, this is what we’re doing. A, B and C.” Spell out some good points, even draw it up. But it wouldn’t solve anything, because no one would listen. When anyone but the CEO talks, the words just vanish into thin air without any response. Unless he gives the okay, no one wants to agree with it for fear of looking stupid. And the CEO rarely reacts, so you spend most of the meeting feeling like you’re talking to yourself. You could proclaim that as God is your master, you will best Barney the Dinosaur in an all-out duel to the death, and still it would seem as though no one had heard you talking. Then eventually the CEO will repeat an idea that someone spoke aloud five minutes prior, and everyone will suddenly react to what a whopping good idea it is! Whoa!

That’s just one side of the story of endless fun and excitement today. We have had this big project going on for the last couple of days. One of our biggest and most important clients—who pays us a lot of money so we can never complain about them, you understand—likes to drop big projects in our lap and ask for them yesterday, and that’s precisely what happened on Tuesday. We needed to put up a custom survey and send out an email blast asking people to come and take it. And it needed to be put up “ASAP.” I hate due dates like this, to begin with. But then, after spurring us into breakneck action, the client proceeded to drag their feet on providing us with crucial information that we needed to complete the task. Two and a half days later, as business threatens to come to a close on Thursday, we still don’t have the text for the email or the rules and regulations for the contest that’s attached to the survey. Nothing! We’ve all sent numerous emails and made numerous phone calls, and we can’t get the goddamn information. Now I hear talk that our contact at this particular client company is going to be out of the office on Friday. So if we don’t get this stuff in the next hour, the survey’s never gonna go live until next week? That doesn’t sound like “ASAP” to me. WTF are we supposed to do now?

It’s easy for someone uninvolved to say, “The client didn’t get you the info, so it’s not your company’s fault.” Yeah—that’s what logic would dictate, but it doesn’t matter because they’ll get pissed at us anyway. It doesn’t help that this particular person at the client agency is a longtime personal friend of one of our salespeople, so it’s like a personal affront if we say anything negative. If this is the case, I ask myself routinely, why doesn’t he get on the phone and try to track down his precious buddy? We’re losing time and money here!

Add to that a rather large, stress-inducing personal problem that I’ve got going on, and it all translates to a situation where I am rapidly coming to my breaking point today. I see so much goddamn whining about stupid, petty issues day in and day out, I cannot stomach any more. It should already be public knowledge that I’m pretty disenchanted with the work we do as a company, in the sense that it’s really not benefiting anybody’s life and the real-world worth of what we do—which has a complete lack of tangible results, for the most part—is quite low. So when I see people getting into hourlong discussions over incredibly vapid details of such business, I just want to scream. I mean, have any of you looked outside the window lately? There are birds flying by who have more important things going on in their lives than this shit!

Anyway, I just received word that the infamous “client who will not give us information” has finally emailed back and said she will be getting us the information in ten minutes. (Note that this is the third time she has told us that the information will be coming soon, so take it for what it’s worth.) Now I’m going to go try to get the email list ready for prime time, so I’m outta here.