Excerpt of the thought process of a hypothetical student stuck in a hypothetical all-day boardroom meeting with ten academics armed with Powerpoint slides.
I just doodled a coffee thermos on my notepad. It’s next to five skinny ballerinas and an estrogen molecule. I sketched those one or seven hours ago. I’ve lost track of time. Tracking it depresses me. Makes me pretty anxious.
The thermos on my notebook looks a lot like its real life counterpart, resting on the lanky melamine table. I stare at it for a minute or ten. Now a girl with an Aerosmith t-shirt and a shoe addiction stands up to refill her coffee cup, momentarily hiding my view of the Powerpoint slide projected at the front of the room. This makes me happy. Some of her coffee drips on a copy of the “Artificial Intelligence in Computing” journal lying on the table. This makes me happier. Who needs scientific papers from 1997 anyway?
Now I start thinking about 1997. That’s when I saw Titanic at the cinema three times. That’s mostly because I liked the part where Rose, in the midst of passionate lovemaking, drew streaks on the foggy car window with her fingers. Hot. If I had an Internet connection right now, I could see that 1997 was also when Dolly the sheep was cloned, when divorce became legal in Ireland, and when Tara Lipinski became the world’s youngest figure skating champion. What would I give for an Internet connection? My soul, probably. But no, the connection in this boardroom only accepts PayPal. Nine dollars for fifteen minutes of web browsing. My soul is worthless right now.
To my left, some balding guy with a plaid shirt and a World of Warcraft addiction is grabbing a pack of Bourbon cream tea biscuits from a wicker basket. After a period of hesitation – should I get ginger nut instead – I do the same. Eating passes time quicker. I’ll probably draw that cookie basket later, when I’m done with a still life rendition of the HB pencil the same balding guy just abandoned. I think he’s bored too. He quit being diligent when he quit his pencil.
I’m now downing my fifth coffee cup. I can’t seem to keep my eyes open. As I bring the brim to my mouth for the 76th time today (approximate – lost count at 12, 24, and 47 sips), I observe concentric rings of brown liquid forming at the bottom of the cardboard cup. I study these for a bit. It passes time quicker. Fascinating stuff. Maybe it’s time for a new cardboard cup.
I admit that I was diligent about seven hours ago. I had entered the meeting room full of hope for enlightenment. Grabbing a blue pilot pen between my thumb and index, I wrote “meeting” at the top of the page in my best cursive font. It’s perfectly centered, and underlined too. The date, “April 28th, 2010”, rests on the line below the doomed title. The rest of that page consists of bullet points whose logic and calligraphic quality vary inversely with their vertical position on the page. With some effort, interpretation is possible until the line where “WHAT?” is written in 3D on the margin, framed with Hawaiian flowers, hammers, and a shark that says “I’d rather be in Philadelphia” in the oval callout above its head. As you can see, hope for enlightenment was quickly replaced with ennui.
The man at the front of the conference room, a pudgy computer scientist/Ebay power seller with a pink polo shirt and a FreeCell addiction, flicks his laser pointer around. I’ve completely lost his train of thought. That’s partly because the room is really hot, due to some architect whose passion for natural lighting superseded his knowledge of the greenhouse effect. I hate him right now. Drips of sweat fall from my forehead and onto one of the blue ink ballerinas doodled on my notepad. Her slim trunk spreads on the page through osmosis, making her look pregnant. I now sketch a baby ballerina in a bath of blue ink blood. I may or may not need to get out of here.
The man with the laser pointer talks about evidential and dialectical modes of argumentation. At least that’s what the Powerpoint slide says. I write this down. Then I add boredom, filling the rest of the line with exclamation points. Which subsequently triggers me to write a sentence containing words that only start with the letter B. This includes the words big, Bodrum, broker, blatantly, bathroom, but, babbles, broad, bears, bubbles, bad, bound, boys and by. What did I just write? Then I jot down “BALDERDASH” in capital letters, for good measure. And with this, meeting minute 347 has swiftly gone by. Perhaps I should sharpen my Scattergories skills?
I may or may not be going insane.
Right now, midway through my seventh bourbon cream cookie of the day, the three guys to my left disgust me. Their computers have better battery life than mine, which died about three hours ago. They seem to have given PayPal all the money it required and are freely clicking away on their respective web browsers. I bet they’re reading emails. Maybe they’re tending to their Facebook radicchio garden and milking their Farmville cows. Maybe they’re downloading porn. Or maybe they’re on chatroulette.com[1].
I wonder who’s paying attention to that poor man with the laser pointer. He’s now talking about some experiment he conducted three months ago. I look around the room. The five people with computers are typing words that are certainly nowhere to be found on his Powerpoint slides. Out of the four others, one is hiding her face with her curly strands of hair, dozing off. One is staring at the wall, saliva slowly dripping down the corner of his mouth. Another is engaged in the discussion. Actually it now looks like the presenter is getting lectured about a concept he’s introduced in a Powerpoint slide. This negates a journal article published in 1989.
A bit of pause from the presentation prop isn’t so bad, I guess, because I’m pretty sure the guy with the laser pointer prepared it at three in the morning, or possibly on his plane ride over here. He wasn’t thinking about 1989. And some words are spelled wrong. Which reminds me of the Vanity Fair article I picked up on Twitter, back in those sweet sweet days when I had Internet access for an affordable price. Penguin just published a cookbook containing “freshly ground black people” instead of “freshly ground black pepper.” I hope the next slide contains something similar. Nope. Only a diagram with words whose definitions I wish I could memorize. Definitions which are wrong again, according to that 1989 paper. Ughh.
If I had Internet, maybe I could read that Vanity Fair story again. Or at least I could plow through the new comments at the bottom of it. Internet. Need Internet. I write this down with emphasis on my notepad, between the baby ballerina and the coffee thermos. I glance at the clock. Nightmare. One more hour to go. I sip on my coffee again. My mind is exasperated, and running out of creative exercises. I feel trapped. I try to exploit this feeling by jotting it down on my notepad. Yes, this is what Einstein meant when he spoke of relativity. I add the quote, in my best cursive writing:
When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours. That’s relativity. – Einstein
The thought of Einstein gives me new life. I try to remember the Lorentz transformations. Then, the Maxwell’s equations. I fill a new blank page with versions of Physics’ most elegant equations, which are probably close of right, but still completely wrong. Call me John Nash. With this, about five minutes go by.
I look up. Now the Powerpoint slide at the front of the meeting room says: questions?
By now, we both have one: are we done yet? For you the answer is easy: yes, almost. As for me, I still have a long way to go. 55 minutes precisely. Or, in the wisdom of Albert Einstein, about 27 hours.
[1] Don’t check this out unless you want to be paired with a random stranger for a webcam-based conversation.)
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Man, that was agonizing to read but I couldn’t stop. Damn you for not giving the reader the satisfaction of being released from that room.
“He quit being diligent when he quit his pencil.” I love your writing.
Joey – Love the link to your blog. Hope the Dirty’s treating you well.
Kristin – Thanks!
Great read. This reminded my of free-association writing, but in a really good, really entertaining way. And wow…347 minutes? It usually only takes 5 minutes of lecture time for my brain to start swirling with thoughts of ballerinas and thermoses.
ps- It makes me happy to know that I’m not the only one who draws organic molecules for fun :)
Nice one Annick. Too bad that at that meeting you weren’t yet fully aware that your unenviable predicament was “only for now”.