Nobody Laughed, Including Me

I got to the end of a workday once and realized I hadn’t laughed in a single meeting.

So I went back through them looking for a smile… nothing there either. My face had spent the whole calendar in the expression you make watching a progress bar think it over. Polite, unblinking, slightly betrayed.

The first thing my brain produced was a complaint. Why aren’t any of these meetings fun? Notice the shape of that sentence. It treats fun like dinner somebody else is cooking, and I’d been checking the oven window all day.

“Didn’t laugh once” is an audit result. Waiting does that to you. You stop experiencing the room and start inspecting it for whatever’s missing, and you get very good at finding it missing. (I should mention I attended every one of those meetings, and I wasn’t funny in any of them either.)

Some waiting is honest. The first time I made a dutch oven meal, it was six hours of “cooking” that was mostly me standing around. The lid stays on. Lifting it to check is how you ruin dinner. That kind of waiting works because something in there is actually cooking.

Nobody had put anything in the oven for those meetings. It was a room full of people staring through the window of an oven nobody turned on, each of us assuming it was somebody else’s night to cook.

That’s the discomfort that doesn’t grow you. Waiting on an empty oven is a chair you’ve sat in too long. Nothing is getting stronger. Something is just going numb. (My bum and my energy…)

Real talk, though… doing something about it might not make the fun arrive any sooner.

If speed were the point, the move would be to lean on whoever’s supposed to be cooking. Suggest an icebreaker. Ask the organizer, kindly, whether we could all bring a little more energy. That’s the annoying version, and it’s annoying because it’s aimed at the schedule.

The other version is aimed at the thing. You make a small, homemade piece of it yourself, right where you sit. You say the funny thing you noticed instead of saving it for later. It might not land. One person in the room still smiled, even if it was only you, which already beats the day’s count.

Launch week has its own oven window. The release goes out and the team spends days refreshing the adoption dashboard like it owes them money. Meanwhile anyone on that team could call one customer and walk them through the feature on their own screen, with their own data. One person won’t bend the chart. It’s still the only part of the launch that’s alive while everybody else stares at a line.

If it’s your meeting, the waiting gets stranger. Rooms copy the face of whoever booked them. Sit at the head of the table waiting for the team to bring the energy and you’ve taught everyone that energy is catered.

The question that shows up around bedtime never asks what arrived. It asks whether I did everything I could today for the things I said I wanted. Waiting guarantees the bad answer, even on a good day, because the honest version is that I watched.

The meetings might stay exactly this beige. That was never the bet. The bet is whether I spend another day as the most patient person in the room, which turns out to be a lousy thing to be the best at.

Stay Positive & I’m Smiling As I Type This BTW