Random Verbal Doodling

I work part-time, flexible hours, from home. At one point some years ago, I did have a desk at which I could work if I were in town and so inclined. Now I save my unit the cost of desking one more body. I do have to put on adult clothes and darken the door of the building from time to time, the frequency of which has been on my mind lately.

Our relatively new (two or so years) boss has tried to have monthly staff meetings but never set a regular day and time such as a designated day of each month at a designated hour. That made it hard to find a time that ten people all had free. A date and time would be announced then changed a time or two before being cancelled. We probably had a staff meeting only every couple of months.

I used the term "staff" intentionally in the previous paragraph. Recently, the university administration decided that our office should be combined with another office, more than doubling our size. That office will remain nameless here but has much more of a business team mentality than does our office, perhaps because they had "Business" in their name while we never have. They have matching notebooks, for example, which they all bring to meetings. They may have matching pens, but I haven't checked. When I turn on my work laptop, Microsoft Teams loads automatically now; it has even started loading on my personal personal computer. I have tried to see how one uses Teams, without success. Actually, I don't want to know how to use it.

What I have been pondering is that as a staff, we had only sporadic group meetings as noted above. Now, as a team, we have meetings scheduled for the next three months. I find this unsettling. For one, I must drive to and from the office, which takes around 20 minutes if traffic and lights cooperate. If we are meeting at what has been our office, I then must pay $2.50 per hour to park and spend 10 minutes walking from and back to the parking garage. I make myself feel better about this by noting that the steps I take coming and going contribute to any daily step goal I might have set.

Why has the team-to-staff switch changed the attitude toward group meetings? Are team members more closely joined at the hip than staff members? Both groups should be working toward a common goal, in our case the accuracy and flow of information to, from, and about the university. Is it that the "team" has twice as many members as the "staff" did? This seems more plausible in that the number of possible connections between individual members or groups of members may require more monitoring.

And maybe I just need to find something better to do during those meetings than doodling random thoughts on a pad of paper that matches no one else's with a writing implement that matches no one else's.

Note: I started writing this post some time ago, before I decided to retire from what was, admittedly, a very good deal. Staff vs. team meeting no longer matters. I like that.