My job up until recently has been blissfully devoid of anything in the way of big meetings that involved not only lots of people sweating profusely in a small room with inadequate air conditioning, but also people dialing in on a group conference phone and I didn’t really appreciate how fortunate I was until today.

Today I had to attend one of these bigger meetings that involved lots of people dialing in on one of those funky octopus-like phones with all the extra microphones on the ends of long tentacles so that the people on the phone won’t miss out on hearing the guy in front of me snort that same wad of mucus back up into his nasal cavity every 3.75 breaths during the entire meeting.

Not that they could hear him most of the time because someone who had dialed-in apparently wasn’t aware that his phone was equipped with a mute button. Or if he was aware, he didn’t understand what the point of it was. I’m also assuming that same person must have been epileptic based on the sounds coming from the phone. You know the sound a phone or microphone makes when you rub it against your shirt? How it sounds like someone is being violently beaten with a foam bat? Or worse when you rub it against a chin with razor stubble how it sounds like you’re trying to sand a boat with the phone?

Yeah, some idiot was doing that all meeting long.

I wasn’t sure if he was doing sporadic jumping jacks in his cube or having short and frequent epileptic fits, but whatever his problem was it kept recurring only slightly less frequently than whatever the problem phlegm boy was suffering from that caused him to keep snorting that mucus back up his nose. At one point the two of them got a little rhythm going and I half-expected other people to join in with their own annoying noises in some sort of weird pseudo-business techno music video or something.

The truly sad part is that I can’t for the life of me recall what the hell the meeting was about anymore.