The Chair

Who has meetings at 8:30 on a Monday morning? What could be so urgent that you need to rouse people from in the wee hours of work, when our time could be better spent, I don’t know, sleeping, surfing the net or convincing ourselves to not turn around and call in sick? Apparently, an early morning gripe session with the Director of the Housing department is more important than those minor pleasures. I drag myself from my computer and my emails and my gossip sites to go sit in a room, count the panels on the floor, and do my homework while the “talented” professional babysitters--sorry, Hall Directors—discuss the perilous struggles of codling freshman and writing up kids for discovering the tart fizz of a tasty Heineken.

Because I run the front office for our unit, I actually have a little prep work today in the early morning, so this meeting has already proven to be doubly inconvenient. I wait for coverage from one of our student workers who gets to the office a little after 8:40, then I power walk across campus to the department’s main office and try to enter the meeting with as much discretion as I can muster.

Of course, there are no seats at the table. Everybody who arrived early got a nice, comfortable, thin-cushioned seat and ample space at the table to strew their book bags, binders and blackberries. But, not me. No place for the person who runs the front and can’t leave because nobody’s there to cover me. No place for the member of the staff who redirects your calls, schedules your appointments and makes sure the angriest kids never see you until they’ve cooled off. But why should I be bitter? They’re polite enough to offer me a corner and point to the stack of chairs in the corner that says “Come on, you didn’t really think they were going to help you out, did you?”

I fought to pry a chair from the stack for about thirty seconds, rattling the metal legs and being an overt disruption—which, I must admit, was great. I dragged the chair across the wood floor, scraping it just enough to make a slightly more annoying than scratching fingernails on a balloon. Because there was no space for me, I was forced into a space next to my supervisor. Lovely. I sit in the most awkward, distant position imaginable. Stuffed between my supervisor and one of our resident busybodies whose stuff claims the table, sitting a leg’s-length away from the table, balancing my pad on my knees, listening to the administrators sit with earnest disinterest as if they really want to hear the junior staff’s opinions on what they’re doing wrong.

My supervisor moderates the meeting and dares to ask if anybody has any concerns about meetings. I dangle on the edge of the chair to, at least, appear interested. Of course the cushion is to thin so every movement leads to a pip squeak that telegraphs the smallest discomfort. A few people offer typical opinions: meetings are too long, agendas are too rigid, committee meetings are too insular. I think to myself, “I’m graduating in four months and soon I’ll leave this job, so what the hell.” I lean up to the table, raising the back legs of the chair six inches above the floor and wait for a silence to interrupt. At the moment when no one else wants to complain I say,

“I think more attention should be paid to meeting attendance. I know, in my experience, that a lot of meetings I go to have nothing to do with my position or my daily duties. So I just sit there with nothing to contribute, listening to issues that only affect a specific segment of the staff. I don’t know about the rest of you, but in my position I have to be present because without coverage there’s nobody there. So, I have to find someone to cover for me when I go to a meeting, just to sit and not participate.”

The looks on their faces. A few brave ones nodded in agreement the others, the ones in charge and those overwhelmed with bureaucratic fear, put their chins to their collarbones.

That meeting and that chair was the closest I’ve come to a breaking point. At work, they—they being upper management—tell us that we should all feel welcome to participate in committees and decision-making regardless of your status or classification. Everybody is welcome to have a seat at the table. But I think it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a seat if they don’t feed you, or if they do feed you, it’s always scraps. Even after my catharsis, I could not avoid that simple moment of alienation. It festered in me the entire workday. I complained to my girlfriend on the IM, I started writing this blog, I grumbled at everybody who came in the office, staff, customer or otherwise. Everybody who came in the office, asked me a question or looked in my general direction caught the Look. The Look where emotion drains from your eyes, you purse your lips crookedly, your nostrils flare with frustrated breath and the only thing running through mind is that by avoiding speech I am preventing myself from exploding into an incoherent rage that will likely get me fired. All this because there were no more seats at the table. All they had to do was save me a place at the table. Was it really that much trouble to make space for one more? Was it really too much to ask for the seat I was promised?

Two days later, my supervisor asked—as if it was some secret—why I made that statement. Before I regurgitated my exact statement from the meeting, I remembered that he didn’t save me a seat either.