Anyway, since meetings are an unavoidable evil, we all have to live through it. But there’s no reason why can’t make meetings more entertaining. Here are some ideas to make living through the ordeal of meetings easier.

Meeting Antakshari
This first game is for between 3-8 players. It is loosely based on the popular “antakshari” game that is usually played with songs. The rules are simple – When a person finishes a sentence, the next person has to take the last word of their sentence, and start a new sentence with that word. This game is enormous fun, especially because of its high tendency to take a meeting off track. Large meetings tend to go off track anyway, so there’s no reason why you can’t be the person proactively taking the meeting to unrelated areas.

If you are an advanced player, you are also allowed to cut off other players mid-sentence to pick off from the mid-sentence word as well.

Here’s an example of how this meeting game is played:

Boss: “We need ideas to improve product quality for the next quarter”
Player 1: “Quarter-by-quarter quality improvements, are incorporated through applying six-sigma tools using Kaizen and other processes”
Player 2: “Processes are not a good way to go. We need to have more intense focus on excellence for all teams”
Player 3: “Teams are only as good as their leaders”
Player 1: “Leaders can lead, but followers must also be willing to.”
Player 2: “To be or not to be, that’s the real question, as said by Shakespeare”

Player 2 wins this round since he has invoked a historical literary figure in a meeting about quality. You can also have other “winning” criteria, like the first player to use “Boogy Disco Dance” wins, or the first player to say 3 consecutive sentences with 4 words or less wins.

Slide Shuffle
This game can be played when there is a presentation that the speaker is walking through. The rules of the game are very simple. Players have to ask the speakers questions to induce the speaker to go back/front in their slide deck. The player that can get the speaker to deviate the most from the current slide wins.

A common strategy that are used to induce the speaker to change slides is to ask questions that are either too ahead of time or too late. For example, if you ask a question like “Sorry, but what’s the goal of this presentation?” mid-way through the presentation, the speaker probably has to go back to the first slide. You can ask more aggressive questions too, like “Actually, I don’t understand your whole premise. Can you please go over that once more?”, which also forces the speaker to go back to the start.

Expert players of this game use some advanced strategies. The most successful maneuver is to get the speaker to go to the last slide, and then get him to go back to the first slide. I’ve seen this done only a couple of times in my career, and it has to be executed with great skill. The first question has to be something like “This is all great, but show me the punchline. What does this all mean?”, which induces the speaker to go to the end. It has to be followed up with “But your assumptions don’t justify this”, which will make the speaker go back to the first few slides where they’ve listed the assumptions.

How Late? and How Early?
This is a game for expert players. The way you play it is that you come really late to a meeting, and leave way before the end, and whoever spends the least amount of time in the meeting wins. This is not a game for the light-hearted, as it needs a whole lot of guts to play, but there is also great glory.

Many people walk into a meeting 5-10 minutes late, but to be really good at this game, you have to walk in 15-20, even 30 minutes late. You make up some excuse why you were late, and also announce that you have a “hard deadline” in 15 minutes, at which point you have to leave.

Players get bonus points of they get the discussion to re-start from the beginning after they are 30 minutes late. A simple “So, what are we talking about?” is enough to trigger a complete rehash of what has already been discussed, but it has to be expertly guided. If there is a slide-deck, an expert player can also say something to the effect of “Can you summarize what’s happened so far for me?”. If the re-summation takes 15 minutes, that gives you enough time to excuse yourself and go to the next meeting, rendering your 15-minute presence in the meeting entirely useless. If you can do this, then you win the whole championship.

If you’ve enjoyed these games, please look at the 2007 edition of meeting games that I had written. Not much has changed in the last 5 years, obviously, but it might give you additional ideas about how to entertain yourself in those boring and never-ending meetings.

The Wife is sitting in front of the TV, watching the French Open. She’s very involved in the match, and there’s no easy way to bring up the topic of buying a car with The Wife (as I’ve learned from previous experience), so I decide to just say it:

Me: “I think you should buy me a BMW M5. It’s only fair!”

The Wife mutes the TV and gives me a stare.
The Wife: “Excuse Me?”
Me: “I’ve been thinking about my life, and what I want from it”
The Wife: “You want a BMW from life?”
Me: “Among other things…”
The Wife: “And why should I be the one buying it for you?”
Me: “Because I bought you Bhel Puri in College.”

Some people have told me that I tend to make great leaps in logic that sometimes other people have trouble following. And by “some people” and “other people”, I mean The Wife.

I suspect a similar thing is happening here. There is stunned silence.

The Wife: “Let me make sure I understand. You’re saying that you buying me Bhel Puri is the same as me buying you a BMW?”
Me: “That is correct”
The Wife: “Don’t you think there’s a slight price difference between the two?”

I was expecting this kind of cynicism from The Wife, but fortunately, I had a bullet-proof argument already prepared.

Me: “You see, you have to see everything in context here. We need to compare the inflation-adjusted prices based on PPP.”
The Wife: “What?”

Me: “See, back in college, Bhel Puri, taking you to movies etc… counted for a very large percentage of my income. That is to say, I spent most of my money on you. Plus, inflation has been roughly 7% for the last decade. Therefore, taking into account Bhel Puri inflation, expressing that as a percentage of my income back in college and converting it into today’s money using the standard Purchasing-Power-Parity(PPP) formula, it roughly works out to the price of a brand new BMW. I can show you the math if you want.”

The Wife: “I don’t think that’s how you are supposed to calculate these things”
Me: “That’s how the IMF and the World Bank does it. Are you saying that the World Bank is wrong?”
The Wife: “Don’t try to overwhelm me with all this Maths jargon and force your way”
Me: “The overwhelming force you are feeling ” (… putting on sunglasses….) “is logic!“

I threw in some theatrical hand gestures along with that last statement for good measure.

While I was absolutely convinced that I had a solid argument, The Wife proceeded to absolutely rip it to shreds about some irrelevant talk about how cheap I was in college and how I spent most of my money on snooker instead of her. Or something like that. I wasn’t really listening.

Anyway, it looks like this argument has not worked. I’ll have to come up with something else. Do you, my dear readers, have any advice as to how I may convince The Wife that it is her honorable duty to buy me the latest BMW M5?

And so, I got thinking. What other addons and accessories could I put on to my car to make driving around the city easier? My first reaction was to think about one of James Bond’s missle-firing cars, but that’s not feasible. So I thought about it a little more, and here’s my list of very feasible car addons to make driving on the roads easier.

1. Electro-crane
Imagine this scenario: You’re late for work, but the car in front is driving unbearably slowly, and won’t let you overtake either. For this scenario, I’m thinking I should attach a small expandable crane to the top of my car. With the simple flick of the button, the crane will extend out, over the car in front. At the end of the crane is a giant electro-magnet. Once the electro-magnet is on top of the car in front, it gets activated, sucking the car in front off the road. The crane gently swings across, deposits the car on the footpath where it belongs, and you can then be on your merry way to office.

2. The Seat Belt WindShield
You know how, the one time that you forget to wear your seat belt is exactly the time when the policeman catches you and fines you for not wearing your seat-belt? According to my calculations, there is roughly 0.001% chance that I forget to wear my seatbelt, but when that time comes, there is inevitably a cop waiting to fine me at the very first intersection. I think the car manufacturers and the cops are in cahoots. The car must be emitting a signal on the police frequencies, alerting them of an easy target.

To get around this problem, I think they should design the front windshield such that it has a small black stripe that goes across right in front of the driver. The stripe has to be designed such that for a person looking into the car from the front, it the stripe overlaps on the driver and appears to be a seat-belt. This way, even if you forget to wear the seat-belt, the cop standing outside trying to catch easy prey is fooled into thinking that the driver is wearing a seat-belt.

3. Surround Sound, but outside!
The sound quality in car audio systems has tremendously improved over the last few years, but all that improvement has been limited to making the sound better inside the car. What I really need is for an improved surround sound experience outside the car.

Let me explain. Lets say there is this crazy driver, zigzaging around traffic like a maniac. I want the car surround system to make a boom noise, and project the sound on to the offending car such that the driver believes he has just burst his tire. For an even more convincing experience, the sound system should incorporate all the surround-sound, dolby-digital magic and make the driver completely believe that his car is out of action. First a boom noise to make him think the tire’s gone, then some screeching and skidding noises, followed by some metal-scraping noises. This will force the maniac to pull over and get out of the car to look at his tires. By that time, I’ll be long gone.

There are so many good ideas out there, and these are all useful ideas that will really help drivers. Instead, the car manufacturers keep focusing on the wrong things – Like rain-sensing wipers. If only the car manufacturers would listen to my ideas, their sales could easily double. I mean, wouldn’t you buy a car that had an elecro-magnet, a fake-seat-belt and surround-sound?

But that doesn’t mean I have given up entirely. Instead of cats and dogs, I have computers as pets.

Some of you may find that hard to believe, but think about it – Computers make great pets! They’re always quite, do exactly as you say, and never bark at guests in your house. Plus, you never have to take them out for walks or clean up after them. Once in a while, they do throw a fit and refuse to start up, but if you caress them and talk nicely to them and clean out their interiors of dust, they’ll be back to their happy selves.

I have some 12 computers and laptops in my house right now. If you add up the mobile phones, tablets, my PS2, PS3, PSP, 3DS, my TV, set-top boxes, receivers and other electronically connected pets, I have a grand total of 35 of them. And they all live peacefully together. Once in a while, the refuse to talk to each other, but all that is needed is a stern scolding to the router, and everything goes back to being nice again.

The Wife has a lot of problems with my pets, though. She complains that our living room looks like the deck of an alien spaceship because of all the LED lights and displays from all of devices I have connected around the TV. When I tried to tell her that’s what makes our living room cool, she said that our TV doesn’t go well with our antique-wooden-statue and the related decor in the room.

I mistakenly suggested that we get rid of the wooden statue, which was a suggestion she did not take well. It looks like the wooden statues and antique ship are more important to her that my 5.1 channel DTS/Dolby-Digital surround sound system. I could never understand how a dumb wooden statue is better than an awesome surround sound system, but then again, I don’t understand a lot of things about The Wife.

Anyway, that’s not all she hates about my pets. You see, since my pets are all programmable, I’ve taught them to do some interesting tricks. For example, my pet computer in my “computer room” has an attached web-cam. And on that computer, I’ve installed some motion-detection software and face recognition software. So what my pet computer does is that anytime someone walks into my room, it snaps a picture, overlays it with the date and time, and immediately emails it to me. It also saves a surveillance video of what the offending person was doing in my room. I have configured this email to directly pop-up on my phone, so in under 2 seconds of The Wife venturing into my room, I receive an alert on my phone. The Wife apparently has some problems with this setup, but I think it’s really cool.

Another cool trick I’ve taught my pets to do is remote-control. I have a private VPN installed on one of my computer-pets, so I can log into my home network from anywhere in the world from my phone, and control all connected devices. A few days ago, The Wife was “working from home”, and I logged into my TV-system from office to see that she was watching some TV shows. I promptly changed the channel from my phone and flashed the message “Working Hard or Hardly Working?” on the TV, sitting in some meeting at office. I thought this was a hilarious little joke, but The Wife thought it very creepy and annoying.

On an unrelated note, I discovered that day our couch is a very nice and cosy place to sleep, and all the LEDs and displays didn’t disturb me at all. I’m so proud of my pets.

In any case, my first dream job was to be a Circus Magician. When I was a kid, one of my uncles took me to the circus, and I remember that the magician in the circus had a profound impact on me. He was making birds appear and disappear as if it were nothing, and he seemed to be controlling fire and smoke and all the other elements by his mind. But what I liked, more than anything else, was his cape. It was just like Batman’s! I originally wanted to be Batman when I grew up, but I was told that he wasn’t real, so I had given up hope. But here was the Circus Magician, wearing a cape that looked like Batman’s and he was undoubtedly real. Wow. Can you imagine being in a job where you wore a black cape all day? That would be so awesome!

And so, I was convinced that this was the job for me when I grew up.

I had to give up the idea of becoming a Circus Magician a few years later, when I found out that you had to travel around the country and live with Lions and Tigers. Cats absolutely terrify me, and the idea of living and traveling with a bunch of big cats overpowered the coolness of the Batman cape. Now I had to get a new dream job.

For the longest time, I thought race car drivers were aliens because of the very exotic uniforms that they wore and their shiny helmets. I imagined they were sent to earth in their weird helmets and colorful uniforms to show earthlings how to escape in fast vehicles from the invading alien army. But since I discovered that race car drivers were just regular people, I decided that I wanted to be one of them. What could be better than sitting in a fast car, driving like a maniac and crashing into other cars? I had also decided that I wanted to specialize in crashes, because that was so cool, and they would play your crash over and over again on the TV. So, there it was, I was going to be a race car driver.

Unfortunately, I had to give up this dream as well, after I found out that drivers tend to end up in hospitals after crashes. My original assumption that race car drivers don’t get hurt because they are aliens was no longer valid, and I really hate getting injections. Damn! This dream was out too.

My next dream job is also my current one. Someday, I want to be a professional Celebrity. I mean, it seems to be that Celebrities don’t do very much, get paid exorbitant amounts of money, get often featured on television and become famous, and most importantly, they an act however they please. For example, for normal people, yelling and screaming at other people is considered rude, but for a Celebrity, that is practically a requirement! Celebrities seem to be able to do stupid things, and everyone else seems to applaud them when they do these stupid things.

That’s the kind of job I want! The only problem, so far, has been that I can’t figure out how to become a celebrity. I guess I just have to wait for the right time and place, and the Celebrity Induction Institute (CII) will find me and turn me into one.

Any day now! I can feel it!

After a tragic encounter with the principal over the contents of my Super-Villain collection, I was forced to enroll in the weekly art class. As you’ll recall, my school was a hoity-toity place that never failed an opportunity to stuff its students with “leadership qualities” and “innovative thinking”. And apparently, this art class was supposed to instill this “innovation” into me.

I was very scared of the art class as I entered the room where it was being held. I had repeatedly tried to convince the principal that I was not meant for art class, but he didn’t want hear it. I even pointed out to him that I can barely write legibly, how was I going to draw and paint? He considered that argument for a second, but went back to his insistence that I attend the class. So here I was. In art class.

The teacher entered the class. Now most teachers came into class with some heavy-duty textbook, but this teacher walked in with a bowl of fruits. Oh yay! I love fruits! Especially Apples.

Good Morning, class”, she said in an enthusiastic voice. “Today, we’re going to be doing a still life painting of this bowl of fruits!”

Bummer. We wouldn’t be eating apples after all.

“Do we have to draw all of the fruits or just the ones we like?”, I asked, innocently enough, because there were like 8 or 10 fruits in the bowl. Amid some giggles from my fellow art-class students, something surprising happened. The teacher also laughed a little. Well, this was strange. Teachers would usually give me angry looks, but this teacher was actually laughing. Something strange was going on.

“You can draw whatever you want!” she said. Strange instructions coming from a teacher.

And so I started drawing. I obviously started with the Apple, you know, because I like Apples.

You know how there are some moments in life where you do something for the first time, and you instantly recognize that you have a natural talent for it? You just do such a good job the very first time that it just blows everyone away, and changes the course of your very life?

That did not happen to me. As expected, I was just as terrible at drawing as I was at writing cursive. And my drawing looked less of an apple and more of a monster truck. And the more I tried to make it look like an apple, the more like a monster truck it looked. The rest of the class just flew by, with my monster truck looking absolutely nothing like an Apple.

And finally, the dreaded time came when all the students had to share their art. The other kids were quite good – Nearly all had managed to draw all the fruits. For one instant, I got jealous and tried to mentally accuse all of them of copying, and it immediately occurred to me that we were, in fact, supposed to copy. Damn, no way to feel self-righteous either. And so, my turn came to show off what I had achieved for the last 30 minutes.

I turned around my drawing sheet, so that the whole class could see it. There were a lot of puzzled faces.

“I decided to draw not just the apple, but the whole apple tree.” I was hoping that everyone would see a tree in the random lines that were etched on the drawing sheet. But it was clear no one was buying it, so I continued.
“But then, a farmer cut off the tree, and made a wooden tractor out of it…” everyone seems to be following what I’m saying, but I’m not sure where I’m going with this story “…and then, when he was quietly driving down the village road, suddenly, out of nowhere, BAM! The Transformers come out. Megatron kidnaps the tractor, but by that time, the apple-tree-tractor has developed super powers…”

The rest of the kids seem to be intently listening to my story, but the strange thing is that teacher is too…
“…and eventually, The Apple-Tree-Tractor succeeds to the Throne of Ereqin. However, in the parallel universe, the king of the jungle fruits, Banana-Man, is secretly holding a grudge…”

And on and on I went for the next 10 minutes, telling more and more convoluted stories about the super-heroes of the fruit kingdom.

Usually, at this point, I’m standing outside the principal’s office, trying to explain why the teacher kicked me out of class yet again, but not here. The art-teacher seemed to be enjoying my story, and even asked questions about why the Apple-Tree-Tractor didn’t use the nuclear codes against the super-villain Mirage. At the end of it all, she even said “Good Job!”, which is really strange, but it felt nice.

And so, week after week, I’d go to the art-class, create some rubbish drawings that barely resembled what the art text-book had, but told elaborate back-stories of the drawings, and the teacher seemed to be encouraging me to tell these elaborate stories. At the end of the year, even though my drawings were nothing to be proud of, I got an “A” in the subject, with the comment “Great visual story-teller!”.

Best Class Ever!

One day, in a class full of “leadership-potential” students, I was sitting at the back, playing book cricket with my back-bencher friends, while the teacher was going on about some Shakespearean drama. She was trying to dissect one particular speech given by the main characters for the last 30 minutes, which is I think double the time Shakespeare himself spent writing it. Anyway, I was sitting back there having fun, when the teacher suddenly called on me.

Teacher: “You’ve not said anything during the whole class! Please share with us what you think of Portia’s speech”
Me: “Err… Hmm…. Let me see….”
Teacher: “Page 34. Why does Portia make such a dramatic speech? Why does Shakespeare instill so much drama into a character?”
Me: “Probably because he wanted to sell more tickets!”
Teacher: “Pardon me?”
Me: “You know, Shakespeare was a playwright, and not a particularly famous one during his time. I’m sure he was trying to add more drama so that his plays would get better reviews”
Teacher: “I don’t think….”
Me: “…like an item number! Yeah! Portia’s speech is the 16th century equivalent of an item number!”

I thought I had made a particularly insightful observation, and the way the rest of the class erupted in laughter seemed to corroborate that. The teacher, however, was fuming.

Teacher: “You! Always disturbing the class! Get out! Go and see the principal!”

And so, I was off to see the principal yet again. I’d become sort of a regular feature at his office, and I think he kinda liked seeing me as well. I went through the door, and sat down opposite Mr. Principal.

Principal: “What did you do this time?”
Me: “Nothing! She asked for my opinion, and I told her what I thought! Promise! I didn’t do anything wrong!”
Principal: “You know what you need, young man? You need a hobby!”
Me: “I already have a hobby!”
Principal: “Really? Do you collect stamps?”
Me: “Not stamps. I collect Spider-Man Super Villains”

The principal appeared befuddled, and I could see that he couldn’t process all that I had said, so I decided to take out my Spider-Man Super-Villains book and show it to him. I reached into my bag and carefully took out a nicely bound 200-page full length notebook. Each double-page in the book had a neatly cut out picture of the super villain, his title, super powers, origin story, which comic books he appeared in and my rating of how cool this villain was on a scale of 1-10!

Me: “Look! I have over 50 Super Villains already! Here’s the Green Goblin…”
Principal: “Wow. You’ve really put your heart into this.”
Me: “…and here’s Cyclone. Check it out, he can create tornadoes!”
Principal: “Why don’t you collect something normal – Like stamps?”
Me: “Stamps are boring. They have pictures of dead people on them.”
Principal: “Siggghhhh!!! What am I going to do with you?”
Me: “Look at this instead – Here’s Mirage, he can become invisible! He uses holographics!”
Principal: “I think I’m going to put you in a special art class. To round out your personality.”
Me: “…and here’s Doctor Octopus. Look, he looks just like you too!”
Principal: “OK, off you go now. Be sure to attend the art-class from Monday!”
Me: “Eh? What? No! Wait.. I don’t want to… But, what’s wrong with Doctor Octopus?”

Despite my vociferous protests, I was forced to enroll in the dumb art class. Oh, man! What fresh hell was this going to be?

Update: Part 2 is here

One of the annoying things that these security people do is to ask to see the ID card of everyone that is driving in through the gate. Now, I’m sure there is some good reason for this check, but the security guards are standing in the hot sun, looking through ID cards through a car’s windshield – They can’t be seeing very much there.

I suspect that the ID card check has become like a ritual to them – It had some use in the distant past, but now no one can figure why they’re doing it. But they do it every day, not really understanding what to expect when they lazily wave their hand at every passing car, making the 4-finger-plus-thumb sign that indicates the driver to show an ID card.

Being a man of action, I decided to test this – To see how easily I could get by the security guys without actually showing my company ID card.

So, the next day, I drove into the office complex fully prepared. As expected, the security guy waved at me, making the show-me-the-ID-card gesture.

I pretended like he was waving “Hello” to me, and so I waved back at him, saying “Hi” and gave him a big smile.

There was a very confused reaction on his face as he tried to figure out how to react to that. It was an absolutely new experience for him that the car owner didn’t absentmindedly show him the ID card, but actively waved at him. Before he could process what had happened, I just drove past.

The next day, I repeated the same thing, he got surprised the same way again, and I got through the security guy a second time without my ID card. This happened for a week, until the security guy’s boss stepped in and had a word with him.

For my next experiment, I decided to see what all things I could pass off as an ID card. There’s no way the security guy can see through the windshield and make any sense of what’s I’m showing him. So what all I could I show instead of my company ID card and still get past?

On Monday, I took my old college ID card and waved it at the security guy at the gate. He let me through.

On Tuesday, I printed out Batman’s photo and pasted it on my college ID card and waved it at him. No problem, he let me through.

On Wednesday, I took the Jack of Diamonds from a playing cards deck and waved it at him. No problem, he let me through.

On Thursday, I waved my car stereo remote control at him. Once again, he let me through.

This was becoming too easy, so on Friday, I decided to step it up a notch. I saved a slice of toast from breakfast and took it with me to office. When the security guys asked to see my ID card, I waved the piece of toast at them. No problem once more, I was let through.

I  think my experiment has been a great success. I have proved that some artifacts from your breakfast are good enough to get you past the high-tech security at these office complexes. I wonder how far I can push it, though.

Next time around, I think I’ll pick up a rock from the roadside on my way to work and wave it at the security guy. I’m sure he’ll be unfazed and let me through.

Here’s the picture of the said bird.

In other news, this blog seems to be rather popular with Nigerian pirates, because I’m getting a lot of hits from just off the coast of Nigeria.

I wonder what the pirates are finding funny.

Sometimes, when I’m standing by myself waiting for a lift, I’ll pretend like I’m a Jedi, and I’ll wave my hand at the lift, mentioning it to open. And if I time it just right, the lift doors open just as I make my Jedi-style hand-wave, and it looks like I’ve opened the lift with my mind. It’s a really cool feeling – You folks should try it sometime.

This one time, I was waiting for the lift at my apartment complex, when a kid came and stood next to me. This kid was maybe 7 years old, and I decided that it would be really cool if I did my Jedi trick and opened the lift’s doors, and it would freak him out. And so, I said, “Hey, you want to see a cool trick?”, and the kid responded “Sure!”. So, just as the lift was about to open at our floor, I lifted up my hand and was about to wave at the door, when it suddenly hit me:

“This kid doesn’t know what Star Wars is! He won’t get how cool this is!”

Crap. Now I’m standing in front of the lift with my hand stretched out and nothing to say. I’m going to make a fool out of myself in front of this 7 year old kid. Damit!

I stood there, about to panic, and just a millisecond before the lift’s doors opened, I decided to blurt out something, just to avoid looking like a fool!

“Khul Ja Sim Sim!” I said, and that too in my most epic voice.

The kid just stared at me, befuddled. I’m sure he was totally confused as to what the hell I was doing. He just shook his head in dismay and walked into the lift. I was too embarrassed to get in, so I mumbled something about the stairs being healthier, and walked up the stairs.

Great! Now a 7-year old kid has bested me. The kid may have won this round, but this was not over. I was going to come up with a more elaborate plan and it was going to be epic!