Part four of an epic four-five-part series. (See also parts one, two, and three.)
Before I get into why I quit as AFM meeting secretary, it must be said that last year I stopped using the laptop to record notes from the meeting. One reason was that I lost the minutes due to software issues a couple times….
Don’t write the minutes in the [internal Abbott family] wiki! You’ll lose everything, like I just did.—From the minutes of the February 6th, 2007 AFM meeting
Not to mention the fact that, at some point last year, my 700 MHz laptop (one that was generously given to me after fixing my friends’ mom’s internet connection) stopped booting up. The only other portable computer we had was an old 266 MHz laptop that is too old and slow to run anything newer than Windows 95. (It runs a lightweight linux distro quite well, though.) I used that to take down minutes for a few months, but it was a bit of a pain in a few ways (which I won’t get into).
So, I started keeping them on paper. That meant retyping my notes, but it also meant reprocessing and rethinking them. The next meeting after I started handwriting my notes, I had several pages of detailed minutes from the meeting. I was impressed with myself. So what was the problem? Too many notes.
That was bad enough, but once I became president things came to a head. The agenda was so thorough, and there was so much in the minutes. I couldn’t just not type them in, but I was frustrated with the state of affairs. The real reason for my frustration, however, was not the hassle of taking and processing notes. The root of it all was, basically, that I didn’t know what the point of holding meetings was anymore.
How did we resolve this “AFM Meeting Crisis?” The thrilling conclusion in my next post…
