ZERO-SUM GAME
When she saw the binders piled on the conference room table Erin’s heart sank. She could always predict the length of a meeting from the heft of the reference material compiled for everyone’s use. Binders were not a good sign.
If there were just legal pads and cheap pens lined up at each seat, that meant only one person would be talking and the rest of them could zone out as long as they occasionally scribbled something on the legal pad.
Legal pads and manila folders weren’t so bad either. The folders usually just held an agenda or a list of talking points and that usually meant there’d be some form of interaction, like brainstorming or maybe a Q and A. Erin didn’t mind question-and- answer sessions. You could learn a lot about your colleagues from the questions they asked. She usually just sat quietly and listened. Her s.o.p. was to jot down random words and then underline them with a thoughtful nod in case someone above her pay grade was watching. Sometimes she would draw a rectangle around a word. Occasionally she would add an exclamation point to the mix and very occasionally, she would sketch a star in there somewhere.
Todd from marketing, who’d replaced Dave from marketing, usually sat next to her and copied her notes right down to the exclamation points and rectangles. He drew the line at stars though. He thought they were gay.
