Mondai Meetings (I don't like Mondays)

One of the most noticeable changes of our little "overseas" place being transformed into something 100% Japanese-like in is the total number and time spent in (useless) meetings. Especially Monday seems to be a day I can quite confidently forget about getting anything useful done for the future. It starts with the weekly team meeting which is kind of necessary, transitions smoothly into people-bother-you-even-while-eating (aka lunch-meeting), followed by the company all-hands meeting with all the information about how to correctly fill out the latest forms. It continues with the research-update-meeting, where you usually hear about which nice conferences people went to, what they ate and (yes there was something...) what ultra-boring presentation they heard that might be slightly relevant to "maybe" one other person in the company. If you are lucky there are a few minutes left in the time slot so you can run and get a mug of coffee before you enter the dreaded research-management meeting where you get confronted with things that regular employees better not see, otherwise they would immediately start looking for a new job (for example 1 year plans to come up with a 6 month plan).

On the bright side - it took the employees only 2 weeks to come up with a new technical term for this state of idle pastime at the beginning of a week: Mondai (=something like "Problem" in Japanese) Meetings.