Today I got paid to waste 4 hours of my day. The company that I contract with happily paid me for this 4 hours of wasted time. You ask how is this possible? Below is a receipe for a massive waste of time and resources.

Part 1: Schedule a mandatory meeting for the entire department of 20 IT professionals.
Part 2: Bring in MS for this meeting to provide technical information. (I was interested at this point.)
Part 3: Meeting starts and the presenter is a Pre-Sales Technical Specialist. (Stay calm. It can't be a sales pitch.)
Part 4: Presentation agenda has four parts. Difference between two versions of products. Talk about 1 advanced feature of new product. Tell group what is lost not using new product. Take questions. (Crap!!!)
Part 5: Presentation is a mega powerpoint slide for three hours with one break after 95 minutes of a comatosed presentation. (I could be doing my checkbook or playing solitare. I did play a Baseball Stars 2000 on my iPhone.)
Part 6: Try and ask questions to keep yourself engaged. Presenter makes you felel stupid and doesn't answer the question. (Example: I asked, "What is a dual infiniband? I haven't run across that terminology before." Presenter answers, "Oh infiniband has been around since I work at x company 6 or 7 years ago.")
Part 7: Have several others ask questions that get avoided if they are toughter than basic documentation level.
Part 8: Meeting is over. (Wow I'll never get that time back. Good thing this was mandatory. I might have got some work done.)

The scary thing about this meeting is that it cost the company $2,400 not including the cost for bringing in the representitive from MS. As I was looking around maybe 4 people at any given time was looking at the presenter with a glazed look in their eye. Everyone else was browsing the internet or chating with someone on IM.