- I am a Scrum Master so I hold a 30 minute Scrum Meeting on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with my team of 10 Scrum Team members.
- There is this Scrum-of-Scrums that all the Scrum Masters have to attend on Monday and Thursday. This covers project-wide communications between the various team leaders and the project leadership (Release Manager, Project Manager, and Chief Programmer).
- There is a weekly project status meeting on Wednesday that has all the various project stakeholder sub-teams (development, test, writers, localization, etc).
Department meetings, on the other hand, are usually scheduled every couple of months. Their primary purpose is to allow your manager to cover topics that are typically of an Human Resources-related nature. In the first part of our last department meeting, The Boss covered vital topics like how to deal with contractors and where to go during a fire drill (stressing that one shouldn’t stop to pick up their smart phone or block exit ways by checking their Facebook status during the drill – you can never take anything for granted with engineers).
There was this awkward pause between the first part of the meeting and the second part, where one of the product architects (guest speaker for our department meeting) would tell us what the themes for the next release of the product would be. We were waiting for the architect to arrive to the conference room when The Boss opened it up to the department for “questions and comments” from the worker bees.
With that, a floodgate of comments were unleashed from the three females in our department regarding the malfunctions of some recently installed sensor-based automatic flushing mechanisms that had been installed in the toilets in the Lady’s Room on the first floor of Building 510 in the IBM RTP complex. Apparently, the sensors needed some tweaking – the end result was that they were triggering the flush action at, well, inopportune times – sort of randomly.
After the meeting, I did some reconnaissance and determined that one of the standing urinals in the second floor Men’s Room had also been upgraded with an automated flush mechanism (though it had been disabled, perhaps due to the same root defect that was afflicting the ladies on the first floor). The second floor urinal was a Kohler toilet outfitted with a Zurn automatic flusher. Apparently Zurn is one of the gold (perhaps I should say porcelain) standards for commercial automatic flushers. They tout their reduction of “false flushes” using their sophisticated infrared sensor technology as well as the ever-handy “courtesy flush” button.
After every department meeting, The Boss will solicit feedback from the team regarding which topics were useful and which weren't. So I bided my time until a couple of days later when The Boss stopped by my office to “shoot the shit”. After some exchange of pleasantries and a quick project update, I summoned my best look of righteous indignation and, with all earnestness, proclaimed:
Boss, respectfully, I have an important issue I want to follow up with you on from the last department meeting. Why do the women get the advanced toilet technology on the first floor? I find this insulting for a company that prides itself on its legacy of equality for all employees. Furthermore, while I empathize with the women that the bugs in the new system are still being worked out…well…come on! It is nothing that a couple of raincoats situated at the entrance to the Lady’s Room couldn’t fix.
I think I had him fooled until the part about the raincoats.
