Over to you, God

It is a plan fact of life that, via nature or nurture, some people are just designed to irritate others.

Here’s my story for today.

Deep in my past I, partly because of my legal training, at one stage in my life I became involved in taking the minutes of board and other important meetings.

Originally perhaps the product of instinct plus my legal training, but later much developed by the experience of undertaking the task upon numerous occasions, I have gained a certain facility for taking notes down swiftly and then later reproducing them – to some degree perhaps edited, re-arranged, summarised and ‘improved’ – in a written form which gives any subsequent reader an impression of what took place that is not only accurate but easily digestible.

In short, though I don’t ever make a major song and dance about this, I became rather good at it.

I recently agreed to join a little organisation in which I found myself volunteering to take the minutes of our monthly committee meetings. I’ve done this half a dozen times now with some success – I can say that because I frequently receive praise from others for both the quality of what I produce and the speed with which I do it.

There’s no particular secret to the latter. I just make it a habit that – the next day after a meeting – I apply myself to nothing else but producing my first draft of the minutes and sending them off to the chairman of the committee for his approval as swiftly as I can, hopefully within 15 hours of the meeting having taken place.

Thus follows a process by which members of the committee now receive copies of the approved minutes of each meeting within 72 hours, rather than the 10 to 14 days that it took with my predecessor as minute-taker.

People seem to regard this as astonishing – I regard it as normal. If anything I’d like to achieve similar in 48 or even 24 hours if this was humanly possible, but it doesn’t appear to be. If it was – the job having been done – everyone concerned (including me) could then move on to other, more important, things in their lives.

One of the reasons for this is the existence on the planet of a gentleman whom I shall call Terry for present purposes – not his real name for reasons that will shortly become apparent, most particularly confidentiality (mine).

For, if I was ever asked to describe an anally-retentive, anorak/trainspotter-type pedant who (despite all good intentions) has zero capacity to see the wood for the trees in any given situation, I wouldn’t need to spend too much time, or expend many words, on the task.

I’d just point at Terry and utter three: “There you are”.

From the moment I joined the committee and took on the task of producing the minutes of our meetings, the Terry complications became instantly apparent.

In the real word as I experienced it, normal practice with minutes is that the chairman of a meeting receives a draft from the taker of them, which – with or without any amendments he might suggest – he then approves.

Then they get circulated to attendees of the meeting and other interested parties. Subsequently, e.g. at the next meeting of that forum, if anyone who was present has a problem with the minutes as approved, this is dealt with as the first item on the agenda. Following which the next item on the agenda is ‘matters arising from the minutes of the previous meeting’ – after which the new meeting proceeds to its main agenda items.

Simple.

Not where someone like Terry is involved, it isn’t.

On every set of minutes I have so far produced for the organisation’s committee, he has emerged from his swamp fretting and worrying about every passage of the meeting (as minuted) in which he was involved and/or spoke. He has sought an audience with me each time in order to go through the minutes (after they’ve been approved and issued) in order to challenge or suggest improvements to what he said, or thought he had said, or even what he would have liked to have said but didn’t.

On every occasion he has done this I have explained the way I approach my minute-taking job.

I take very detailed notes of the proceedings and what was said and then ‘work this up’ into a form which (I believe) is straightforward and easy to understand. In doing so, I sometimes convert long passages into a summarised ‘There followed discussion in which …” section, in which I list the main points raised or decided and discard irrelevant contributions (the production of which Terry seems to specialise in).

I then explain to Terry that, whilst in all cases I’m prepared to correct factual inaccuracies and almost always prepared to accept any suggested chances to my draft which improve it, my minutes are always my version (as accurate as I can possibly make it) of what took place at the meeting.

Thus, when Terry comes to see me and – for example – dictates to me a seven-line paragraph which he thinks better represents what he would have like to have said at a certain point in the meeting, I sometimes have to explain that I may have a problem with it.

It is the simple (obvious) one that he didn’t bloody well say it and therefore, technically, my minutes will be rendered inaccurate, if not false, if I take his suggested amendment on board.

I point out that if, of course, these were his minutes to produce, then he could write them entirely as he wishes – and whether that renders them ‘better’ than any minutes that I would have taken, or alternatively instead represents a complete fabrication of his own imagination, would be of little or no concern to me.

We had a committee meeting over the weekend after which I tried a different subtle tactic.

I gave a copy of my ‘first draft’ of the minutes to Terry so that he could supply me with his suggested improvements before I submitted a copy to the chairman. I then spent an hour with him accommodating as many of his suggestions as I felt comfortable with before sending the end product off to the chairman for his approval.

This morning I can report that my little ruse did not work.

Although I’m still waiting for the chairman to get back to me with his approval, Terry has already written another email to me containing more suggested changes that he has ‘noticed’ since we had our meeting to discuss his earlier ones.

The trouble with people like Terry is that – if you give them the opportunity to fuss and fret about something – that’s exactly what they’ll do.

If Terry ever got appointed as chairman of our organisation, responsible for approving our committee’s minutes, he’d never manage to approve any of them, instead he’d go on ‘improving’ them until the end of time itself.

At least it wouldn’t be a problem that would concern me.

I’d have topped myself the moment his appointment as chairman was announced!