For those of you who are reading this blog (which probably numbers only 3 or so people) and who desperately want to know where I work (ah! Now I have you on the edge of your seats!), I will attempt to explain the inner workings of a....Higher Education Institution. Of course all names and places are changed to protect the innocent (mainly me) and so I don't get fired.
I work in a Higher Education Institution in a nice building, in a nice part of London with a nice team of women (and one man - yep, you should pity that man). Unfortunately that is as nice as it gets. Don't get me wrong, some days I love working where I do. After all I got to go to 5 separate work Christmas parties last year and it didn't cost me a penny (and I ate plenty of mini sausages wrapped in bacon at each party). But at the same time, like any institution or business, my workplace is steeped in bureaucracy, riddled with a 'culture of meetings' and strewn with the most magnificently large and difficult egos you will ever encounter outside of Banking or Politics.
Before I worked here, I had never been to so many meetings in my entire life. You could collect up all the hours I spend in meetings (normally asleep) and then add them together and it would probably equal up to a 1/4 of my life. Probably more time than I spend in the shower or eating doughnuts. How sad is that?! I do try to make the meetings more interesting. I don't mind the small meetings so much; the ones that are just between me and my team are usually quite genial and can be quite useful. Sometimes I even make people laugh. At least no one has actually cried yet. And sometimes we chat about fun stuff like going to the pub and gossip about our students.
But the big meetings! The ones that have 100 or more people in them and take place in an airless, windowless lecture theatre. I actually find myself ready to scream when I enter these meetings. Some member of staff I have never seen before and who I will not remember when I meet them at a drinks reception 6 months later, gets up and talks in a monotone voice for a good portion of an hour, while flicking slowly through a PowerPoint presentation that as far as I can tell has no bearing on my job whatsoever. I suspect I am slowly and regularly being sublimely hypnotised into pledging my soul to my workplace in these meetings. My eyes start to close and I fight to stay awake. I fight in various ways. I dig a pen into my thigh (always effective), I pinch the skin on the inside of elbows, I write a poem, I imagine everyone has transformed into root vegetables and often I try to perfect an interested and intrigued, but also extremely intellectual expression on my face.
Except today my meeting was different! I had a meeting with 45 new students! Online! In a Webchat! My first team webchat! I logged on and spoke through a phone. It was ever so exciting. I sat there listening to my boss chatting away online thinking this is how people must have felt when they discovered the phone or how to send a telegram or how to cook rice in a modern rice-cooker. It felt good to be able to give information to people who were avidly hanging on your every word across the other side of the world and whom you could hang up on whenever you felt like it.
JJ, one of my colleagues, a woman who was brought up in Sweden and educated at a drama school in London, suddenly developed a very posh, almost Royal, British accent while talking over the phone. Both my boss, Ash and I glanced at each other with raised eyebrows upon hearing JJ's plummy tones filter through our headsets. It is true that JJ normally speaks with an English accent. After all that acting training I guess it is just something she picked up. In fact I refused to believe she was actually Swedish until I heard her swear in her native language. But she had never sounded quite so posh and clipped before. It was like listening to a 1940s BBC newsreader over the airwaves.
Ash sounded strange too. Her speech became slower and she paused more often, elongating her words slightly and talked in a deliberate way that made her sound as if she was explaining particle physics to a bunch of seven year olds. This is unusual for Ash, who is a bubbly Californian and often punctuates her speech with bunch of expletives and words like Douchebag, while emphasising her point often with the raised volume of her voice. But then obviously you can't call a whole bunch of students Douchebags. Even when they don't attend their lectures and as much as we would like to.
And of course my speech changed as well. JJ said my voice sounded deep and husky. She even went as far as saying, perhaps I could consider a career as a sex phone operator if things got really bad with the job market in London. All I was aware of was how fast I spoke. Just the idea of 45 people listening to you speak even if it is over the internet and they can't see you, filled me with nervousness and I started talking in a rapid fire machine gun rhythm, that was even hard for me to understand, let alone a student in China with English as their second language.
Despite this strange mix of oratory styles, we had great feedback from the students on our first web chat. So the lesson learned is:
In a meeting, if you want someone to remember what you say and to not lose consciousness when you present to them, alternate the speed of your speech, emphasise certain words, keep your voice deep, sexy and alluring and most importantly speak in an English accent. Best of all, if the meeting is a Web Chat, there is no need for you to even wear any clothes...
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