No, I Will Not Have Lunch With You

One of my biggest pet peeves in the work place is unnecessary meetings, or really, unnecessary communication in general. For instance, an email sent one minute, and arriving my office the next to check if the email had arrived yet. “It arrived! Email is amazing!”

There are similar problems in my department, but more along the lines of scheduling unnecessary meetings, and then talking about the meetings in the hours preceding and following said meeting. For instance:

9:15 - “There’s a meeting at 9:30, are you available?”
9:25 - “You’re all set for the meeting in 5 minutes?” (Sometimes at this point, a sheet of paper is handed out with topics that will be talked about in the meeting).
9:30 - Three of us in a meeting. Yes, three.
9:45 - Meeting over. Last bit of the meeting is talking about how great the meeting was.
11:00 - Boss strolls into office, “So, that was a good meeting. What did you think?”

Almost all of these events are a complete waste of time, and I’m doing all I can to stop it. The principal offender is my indirect supervisor/boss, who for brevity I will refer to as S, from now on.

Last time we had a meeting, I rallied my coworkers to preempt the casual post-meeting with S by immediately having a discussion on how the meeting went after the meeting was over. While I thought this would surely solve the problem, it did not. A few hours later: “So.. that was a good meeting. What did you think?”

Please, let me clarify. This “what did you think?” does not end with me saying “fine”, and him walking out the door. There are several minutes of meaningless blabber, and I (admittedly very transparent), am continually dumbfounded as to how my “If you don’t have anything meaningful to say, please leave” expression on my face isn’t recognized at all.

This problem has only gotten worse since I’ve become a “manager”. Even though my responsibilities are practically the same, unnecessary meetings keep getting scheduled. And even worse, I heard from my coworker that S recently said to her “Jeff is really doing a great job. I think I need to meet with him more often.”

Wrong move, my friend. Great job should equal fewer meetings, not more.

I’m convinced that aside from writing necessary grants, scheduling meetings is all this man does with his time. I constantly see him running around asking people when they’re available to meet. Just today he said to me:

S: “So, I think we should try to have lunch sometime this week or next.”
J: “For what?”, I asked.
S: “Oh, just to talk. So you can keep me up to date on things. Just sometime this week or next. Let me know when you’re free.”

I think it’s best that we do not. If a one-on-one lunch ever happens, I will surely be:

a. Wasting my time entirely, as there is nothing to “update” him on.
b. Writhing in awkward pain the entire lunch
c. Taking the first step down the slippery slope, ending up with him inviting Maggie and I over to dinner — a fate other coworkers have suffered.

I think I’ll just take the passive aggressive role here, and not tell him when I’m available. As for the other problems, I’m not sure how to solve them, tactfully. Any suggestions?