Office Speak: “I’ll give you 2 minutes back.”

You are sitting on a conference call that thankfully is nearing it’s long and bitter end. It’s the fifth or sixth of the day and your ears are the temperature of the inside of an oven underneath the plastic covers that they’ve had on for the last few hundred minutes. Your bladder has reached volume level 11 and is screaming for some relief. Your head is numb from the diversity of subjects that you’ve had to give your attention to and then the person who has been facilitating your torture for the last 58 minutes says, in a tone which suggests that it’s a special gift:

“We’ve reached the end of our agenda, so I’ll give you 2 minutes back.”

There are many variations of this line which may be 5 minutes, or even 10. It’s rarely more than that because it’s almost unheard of that someone who has booked an hour long meeting successfully expedites departure in 30 minutes. We all know, after all, that meetings generally grow to fill the available space.

There you sit, looking at your gift of a few minutes and think to yourself “what am I supposed to do with that?”

You take a quick trip to the toilet, but that doesn’t take you more than a minute and now you’ve only got a minute, or perhaps two, left. What are you going to do?

You don’t have any emails to look through because that’s what you were doing for much of the last 58 minutes and the few minutes you have aren’t going to make much difference to any backlog anyway.

Perhaps you have enough time to make a drink, but you’ve already had enough coffee and your bladder is still recovering.

There’s no point in trying to progress any of the actions that you’ve picked up in the previous calls because they all require you to think and you’re not capable of that type of thinking at this time in the day.

You haven’t seen any daylight yet so a walk outside would lift your spirits, but there’s barely enough time to get to the front door of the building before you need to be on another call. There’s not even enough time for a nap.

And so, you sit there, wondering what you are supposed to do with this gift that you have been given and watch it walk steadily and slowly out of the room.