10:30 am.

We haven't done three things in a long time, and I just happened to have three meetings this week. Coincidence? Entirely!

These development meetings can be a nice way to break up the day sometimes, but they're also incredibly draining. Basically, someone has an idea for a feature or some improvement to our product. So they call a meeting where we can get everyone together to hash out how the feature should work and look. This sounds simple enough, except that no one seems to agree on anything, and we end up getting in very heated discussions about very minor things. It's frustrating, because at some point, you just want to throw your hands in the air and shout, "BUT WHO WILL FEED THE CHILDREN?"

And no one will feed the children, because this meeting is about whether buttons should be on the left or the right, not hunger.

Meeting 1: Wednesday - Context Menus
Context menus are the ones that pop up when you right click. They are specific to their context, which is why they're called "context menus," not "super cool and helpful menus that a lot of people don't know about." The purpose of this meeting was to pare the menus in our application down a bit, because they were getting lengthy.

The reason we often have such different opinions is that we each use the product differently. So while one guy thinks that's it's a no-brainer to remove a menu item, half a dozen of us might raise our hands and say we use it every day, are you crazy, THAT MENU ITEM IS A SAINT! And then we start changing captions, trying to decide if the word "Insert" more accurately describes the action than "Generate." Voices are raised, feelings are hurt, all because you think the work "Generate" is vague. And then, just when you think you have it all settled, one of the guys from support, who deals with real, live users every day, tells us that no matter what we do, people are going to be confused and angry. I sometimes think that the real purpose of these meetings is to make the rest of us thankful that we don't work in support, where everyone is confused and angry all the time and it's always your own personal fault.

In any case, I usually have an opinion at first, but soon give it up, having lost the will to argue to-may-to/to-mah-to issues. I don't care anymore. Just tell me what to do and I will do it, but please stop arguing about it.

Meeting 2: Thursday - Linux update
Some user brought it to our attention that our application looks really clunky and dated on Linux. And while the precise shade of gray we use for the background has no bearing on how well our application works, it does seem to matter. If a user looks at a program and wonders if it's 1995 again, that's going to affect his perception of the overall product.

I tried to avoid this meeting, having no particular interest in it. That's allowed. But about thirty minutes after the meeting started, while I was getting actual work done instead of doodling in a meeting, my boss came up behind me and said to come to the meeting. I had my headphones on, so I couldn't tell exactly what he said, but I got the gist. I hustled to that meeting, knowing only that I had tried to skip out, but my boss came and got me. Had he known my middle name, he might have used it.

I arrived at the meeting to find the room empty. The projector hadn't been working before, so he had dismissed everyone until it was working. He came around to tell everyone to come to the meeting, not realizing that some people had tried to opt out. So I sat in the corner and listened while we noted that everything in our Linux version was too gray, too square, and too fat. Gray, square, and fat was apparently the 90s style, but it is now time to move on to a slightly lighter gray, rounded edges, and thin.

Meeting 3: Friday - New Project Dialog
In March, we released a new version, which featured a new dialog. The dialog was my assignment. I did it after two meetings, having been given very clear instructions on exactly what the dialog should look like and how it should behave. I even sent out screenshots of the dialog to make sure that everyone was happy.

Now, two months later, everyone has decided that the dialog is the stupidest thing ever conceived. We are scrapping it completely. Once we decided to do that, it became a free-for-all as people tried to decide what we DID want, as opposed to that other dialog, which no one ever can remember wanting at all. This frequently happens, as you have a good basic idea, but then pretty soon you are overcome with good ideas that no one will ever have time to implement. "What if it automatically detected your project type?" quickly turns into "What if it could bring pets back from the dead?"

And that was my week of meetings. Just think: I work at one of the good places.