many meetings

(Get it? It's a reference to The Lord of the Rings....)

At my current job I have to attend quite a few meetings. Some of the meetings are very useful with valuable information. Some are not as useful. But I almost always go to everything they tell me to. Except once I accidently moved my calendar to the wrong day and consequently missed all my afternoon meetings, but I got a lot of work done that day.

Today I was scheduled for ten and a half hours of meetings. I don't actually work ten and a half hours a day. Some of my meetings were overlapping, so I had to pick and choose which meetings to go to. I've never been scheduled to go to that many meetings before. It was crazy - just one meeting after another.

In order to keep from going crazy in my meetings I sometimes have to do things to entertain myself. Besides the usual doodling and daydreaming, I have other activities to occupy my mind during these meetings. Today I actually started singing out loud on accident. I got a very strange look from the guy next to me. I knew it was time to engage my Alternate Meeting Activites.

The first of these that I have is to divide everyone into teams in my head and then see who would win in a rumble. Like I pit all the people with glasses against the non-glasses. Or those with drinks against those without drinks. Married vs. Single. Talkers vs. Non-talkers. Bad hair cuts vs. good. Once I have the groupings, I see who is on which team and I decide which team would win. Then I redo the groupings and go again.

Another activity (being the silly girl that I am) is to match everyone up in the room. I look around and see who would make a cute couple and I hook them up in my head. Sometimes people get left out because there are rarely an even number of men and women in the room, and so then I have to decide who gets a companion and who remains a lonely heart.

Along the same vein, I sometimes rank the men in the room in the order in which I would go out with them, 1 being he's the first guy in the room I would go out with. Depending on who is in the meeting, sometimes certain girls beat certain boys in this category. I don't stop my rankings there, though. I will rank people on who I like to talk to, who is most likely to quit first, the order in which I want to punch you in the face, etc. These rankings are gender neutral . I also will do physical characteristics like tallest to shortest, fattest to skinniest, oldest to youngest, darkest to lightest.

The downside to these activities is that usually I'm looking around the room constantly in order to form my teams or gauge people's weight. Usually if your head is moving around that much, people notice, so I have to be a little careful and observe covertly.

I have a few more mental activities, but this post is already getting long and I've already started thinking about which one of you would be able to beat me in a fight, so I think I'll end here.