Sure, Cancel My 6:30am Meeting... at 6:05am
I got up early today to be ready for a 6:30am meeting with teammates. Get up early was doubly hard after only getting to bed at 1am after a family emergency last night. I got only maybe 4.5 hours of sleep and I was dragging. But I did it. The meeting was important, after all. We needed to sync for an important demo with a customer this morning at 8. But when I logged on to my work computer and checked my messages ahead of the call I found it had been canceled, at the last minute.
I'm not a fan of early morning meetings to start with. I get that they're kind of unavoidable in modern business, where our employers have shameless hired people all over the world to save a buck here or there. The same employers who now want us to work in their office. ...But which office? The one near me, the one near my boss 500 miles away, or the one near my colleagues 2,500-10,000 miles away? Well, I accept doing occasional meetings early or late. But it really grinds my gears when people on these calls, knowing their colleagues are making exceptions to work with them, cancel at the last moment.
This problem of early-morning meetings being canceled at the last moment- or even 5-10 minutes after they're supposed to have started- is not new. It's happened a few times recently.
Oh, but this time gets worse. It gets worse because that canceled prep call hurt us.
Because we didn't prep we went into the 8am demo call and fumbled. The person driving the demo failed to show the basic capabilities the customer had made clear they wanted to see, and the idiot sales manager wasted time creating a worthless distraction trying to wedge in a whole different product that solves a problem the customer wasn't even interested in. We missed the point, and the customer told us.
I'm not a fan of early morning meetings to start with. I get that they're kind of unavoidable in modern business, where our employers have shameless hired people all over the world to save a buck here or there. The same employers who now want us to work in their office. ...But which office? The one near me, the one near my boss 500 miles away, or the one near my colleagues 2,500-10,000 miles away? Well, I accept doing occasional meetings early or late. But it really grinds my gears when people on these calls, knowing their colleagues are making exceptions to work with them, cancel at the last moment.
This problem of early-morning meetings being canceled at the last moment- or even 5-10 minutes after they're supposed to have started- is not new. It's happened a few times recently.
Oh, but this time gets worse. It gets worse because that canceled prep call hurt us.
Because we didn't prep we went into the 8am demo call and fumbled. The person driving the demo failed to show the basic capabilities the customer had made clear they wanted to see, and the idiot sales manager wasted time creating a worthless distraction trying to wedge in a whole different product that solves a problem the customer wasn't even interested in. We missed the point, and the customer told us.