Meetings ARRGGHH!

Another reason to be retiring: Meetings. Meetings are the bane of academic culture. Meetings, in academe, are inefficient, intrusive, ego-tripping power grabs. Political types love meetings. Lonely people love meetings. Get-a-Life types love meetings. Non tenured brownnosers love meetings. I qualify as none of the above. For every ten meetings I get sucked into, one is necessary. Meetings are usually initiated by people who have nothing better to do with their time – people who demand to be the bull’s-eye of attention. At work, I duck all the meetings I can because I am anal about getting work done, and for each minute or each hour I spend in a useless meeting, that's one minute or one hour where my very necessary work doesn't get done. I attend meetings – all the time – wherein people gab for the sake of gabbing, and demand center stage for the sake of attention and ego tripping. Most people who run meetings lose control of the meetings. Often people who babble in meetings do not engage their brains before speaking and talk about things that are not on task or on the agenda, and the person running the meeting has no idea how to redirect the person or simply say: “We can put that on the agenda for next week if you like.”
Then there are meetings that do not start on time and meetings to which the chronically tardy are consistently late. Such lateness may not be some kind of passive-aggressive statement, but it can be a pain for several reasons. Let’s take the meeting. First of all, I came to the meeting on time and had to sit through the introductory remarks which can often be a boring rehash of previous info. Then here comes the Late Great Meeting Attendee ten minutes late and we have to start all over and I have to hear the rehash rehashed. I have a very low threshold for boredom so this is excruciating for me. I’m also on a tight schedule scholarship wise as well and would like to get in and get out of the meeting as quickly as possible. Also, and maybe it’s just me, but isn’t there a measure of arrogance attached to someone who doesn’t seem to be bothered with the same time constraints everyone else in the room deigned to obey? Is anyone so important they can consistently waste the time of their co-workers?