Guppy noises on a Tuesday

First of all, I can't even believe it's only Tuesday. What a long freakin' week it's been.

Today our office had a "clean-up day," during which it's forbidden to have meetings; once a year, we're supposed to reserve the day for cleaning out our electronic files that clog up the system (there's another day reserved specifically for cleaning out the physical office). Of course, being such a rebel, I secretly participated in three meetings anyway, and they were all kind of long and drawn out and painful, and now I probably won't win a prize for most files deleted.

Anyway, in one of these meetings, I was feeling incredibly frustrated because the conversation just kept going around in circles; the same issues that came up a year ago on this project are still coming up, and round and round we go. Luckily, it was a conference call, so I pretty much kept quiet and let the other people hash out what they needed to.

In my next meeting, I wasn't as lucky; I was in the room with a lot of senior people who know more about the project than I do, but I totally disagreed with much of the direction of the conversation. And I had no capacity to express why I disagreed, other than gut instinct, which doesn't go very far with this crowd, or to offer other solutions that weren't met with total silence. Sometimes they were jumping around so much that when I thought I had my head around it and had worked out how to express my point, they'd moved on to the next, and I sat there with my mouth half-open, having started to talk but abruptly deciding the moment had passed.

Minnams calls this phenomenon "the guppy," even though she doesn't usually attribute the behavior to me. But there I was, totally being the guppy, fully aware that I was the guppy, and kicking myself because I know how incompetent Minnams' usual guppy comes across when she pulls this, and how badly I was revealing myself to be a total fraud.

Miraculously, though, I think I came through in the end. A generous colleague (who I think used to be a therapist, which explains a lot) in the room said, "Tangentwoman? It seems like you might not agree with this idea. What would you recommend?" and once the floor was mine, I was fine, and I meandered my way to valid arguments that wound up carrying the day in the end. But boy, getting past that guppy thing was tough, probably in part because I was so self-conscious about the guppy thing.

Thanks, Minnams!

Just kidding; it's all part of this wonderful world of career skills development and junk, although this kind of cracking under pressure makes me worry that I'm not particularly well-suited for my current job.

When I was in college and my dad was concerned that I didn't have a career picked out, he sent me to this career counselor guy he knew who gave me one of those tests that in high school told me I should be a flower arranger. The one I took in college told me I should be a director of religious education or a speech pathologist.

I actually have been thinking, just in the last couple of days, that maybe I ought to look into this speech pathology thing, although I know nothing of what such a job would entail, in terms of training or practice. Would I have to work with lispy kids in trailers and instill in them a lifelong hatred of Cheerios? Or would it be working with those people in the New York Times article a couple of weeks ago who somehow have never developed a capacity to change the inflection in their voice, so they always speak in a monotone? Or is it something totally different -- is a speech pathologist different from a speech therapist? I need to investigate this, I think.