I don’t mind the murmuring, nor the sociable way in which office minions seek confirmation from colleagues as a means of bolstering their failing courage. The annoying bit is the way no-one dares express what it is that is supposed to be taking place any minute now.It is, of course, the daily morning status meeting which meets every day and every morning, at the same time: 9:30am. Yet everyone is scared of mentioning it by name, as if they’re afraid it might invoke a hex or cause kittens to be drowned on the other side of the Earth.There is logic to all this. Given that our developers refer to themselves as “wizards” and indeed the entire IT project appears to be largely a work of magical fiction, our daily morning status meeting is probably a kind of Voldemort. It shall not be named.Recently, they have begun referring to it as the “nine-thirty”, which gives it both cryptic anonymity and a kind of numeric retro vibe, like Hawaii Five-O.That said, looking across the meadow of freshly installed desk pods, interspaced around a silk-cushioned breakout area, an incomprehensibly complex Apple Pay-enabled coffee machine and the executive ball-pond, it’s not exactly Hogwarts.
No indeed – it’s a veritable circus of death. Its pathway is painted in red and, behind it, a trail of the dead. Back at Hawaii Five-O, McGarrett is wearing a frown.A juvenile colleague twangs my headphones. “Shall we...?” Typical: blind youth taking the path of least resistance.With heavy heart, I slink my way to the giant aquarium that masquerades as the meeting room, offering all the privacy of a Facebook account.Here’s the worst bit: it is not just a status meeting but a stand-up. The first time I attended one of these, I totally misjudged the concept and baffled my colleagues by telling them about a funny thing that had happened on my way there, before telling them they’d been a great audience and wishing them goodnight.The purpose of a stand-up, I now understand, is to speed up the meeting by ensuring the discomfort all attendees by denying them the opportunity to sit. This is supposed to encourage everyone to be brief in their status reports so the meeting ends quickly and they can dart back to their pods and rest their chins.Each of us in turn delivers a brief update on what we are doing at the moment. When it’s my turn, I give my usual status: “I am standing in a meeting room, when I should really be working, and I am telling you this”.I am a giant of prevarication. I am a colossus of meeting-speak. I am Empire State Human.
Job done, I turn to an adjacent colleague, raise my eyebrows and nod at him to indicate that it’s his turn. I can do this so convincingly now that he gives a little twitch and immediately blurts into his own report before giving the project manager a chance to question mine.As I lean precariously against one of the glass partitions, I return to my dreams of leaving and scroll through the unanswered work calls and emails that are popping up in real time on my smartphone. Instead of dealing with these, I am forced to endure the the stand-up inanities of the glass torture chamber for another half-hour. Life kills, eh?When I did this during a status meeting last week, one of the emails revealed the findings of a Harris Poll, commissioned by SaaS work management outfit Clarizen, into the crushing effect of status meetings on productivity. It claimed that staff spend up to 30 per cent of their working week in status meetings.Logically, this means they spend almost a third of their time explaining to colleagues and bosses what they do during the other two-thirds. Strictly speaking, however, they’d have to spend only two-thirds of my time explaining what they had been doing during those two-thirds, plus another third reporting on the remaining third that they’d spent in status meetings.
Most intriguing was the poll finding that of the 65 per cent who confess to multitasking during a meeting, 11 per cent spend the time on the toilet.This sounded like a terrific idea and I was determined to try it out the next morning, but I can assure you from personal experience it does not work. As it turns out, as soon as you try to sit down on the bucket, the project manager insists that everyone should remain standing. Bloody stand-ups, they’re so inconvenient.I have the feeling that the clunky, over-wrought meetings of the past were rather more substantial than the modern ones that take place every nine-thirty. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of the past. Most things get better over time. But some things get worse and this just happens to be one of them.Just occasionally, originals can sometimes feel meatier than their flimsy modern iterations. A bit like CRT monitors in a way: they might have been clunky with lots of wires and made an irritating buzzing sound, but they had substance and integrity back then before turning into shiny, lightweight crap.Panasonic's the latest company to fall foul of dodgy batteries, finding that the rechargeables shipped with its CF-S10 laptop may overheat, cause smoke, or may ignite causing a risk of a fire or a burn hazard to consumers and the computer.
The CF-VZSU61U rechargeable battery pack is the culprit and appears to have come to the attention of Japanese authorities in late 2015, according to this report: A serious product accident occurred involving a battery pack for a laptop computer manufactured by Panasonic Corporation, causing the product to ignite and to burn its surroundings.Canada has since issued a recall for the battery back and Australia's joined in. Each nation is mentioning different time spans for its recall. Japan and Canada [PDF] say machines manufactured between July 2011 and April 2012 have the combustible batteries. Australia says machines bought between April 1st, 2012 and June 1st, 2013 have the problem.Wherever you are, check out the links above, which provide contact details, so you can secure a replacement that Panasonic is handing out gratis. As it ought. The can of worms we opened when we learned of the server switched off after eighteen years and ten months' service is still wriggling, as a reader has contacted us to tell of nearly 30-year-old laptops still in service.Reader “Holrum” says he has “a couple dozen Toshiba T1000 laptops from the mid 1980's still fully functional (including floppy drives).”The T1000 was introduced in 1987, but that's long enough that we'll forgive Holrum the slight lapse, not least because the machine was one of the very first computers to use a clamshell form factor.