Susan Morrison: Meeting gobbledegook really takes the biscuit

YOU need biscuits at meetings. It keeps the blood sugar up so you can fathom out what's being said. For some reason, the combination of chocolate bourbons and a PowerPoint screen directly affects the speech patterns of even sensible Scots and unleashes meeting speak.

I mean, where is this ball park they keep going on about? More worryingly, there seem to be two of them. At the last meeting I dozed through, it suddenly transpired that the ball park Angela had been discussing wasn't the same one Angus had in mind, and therefore the projected forward contingency budget requirement for BluTak had to be completely revised in view of the new fiscal re-imagining.

The word "empower" always had me choking on the Rich Tea, especially if it was winging my way. Footsoldiers like me knew that the word "empower" meant "more work." Thus a sentence such as, "It would be great if we could really empower Susan to deal more effectively with the on going work flow" translated as "let's just pile the lot on the crazy lady and then let her get on with it without the need to watch what she's doing".

My breaking point is usually the word paradigm. I usually glaze over . . .

Some of the great meetings of all time were, I am sure, gobbledegook free. Sitting freezing in their tents in white-out conditions, I bet no-one turned to Shackleton and said, "what we need here, boss, is some blue sky thinking and a repositioning of our core values to match this new challenge to our ongoing personal development".

I once worked for a fabulous press officer at BT. The Mighty Babs had a built-in babble detector and a low boredom threshold. During one particularly incomprehensible meeting, where we had been told that we were going to be thinking outside the box, scoping the tank traps and re-assessing our mission statement in a top-down manner, Babs suddenly swung around and announced that she was totally on-message, but we should really salmon-leap the issue.

The creatives from London and the marketeers from Edinburgh gawped. Salmon-leap? No-one asked. Babs smiled serenely. The meeting shuddered to a halt. Then the assembled executives fell over themselves to agree, gosh, jings, lets take this off line, get back to the core idea, reassess the paradigms and umm – salmon-leap the issue.

Fast forward some years. A friend of mind is in a meeting with the BBC, which involved ideas people and croissants. Yes, croissants! Recall the outrage at Jonathan Ross's pay packet? And all the time the licence fee is being squandered on French pastry.

To his utter astonishment, half way through the meeting, an expensive consultant used the term salmon-leap. It still doesn't mean anything. I like to think of it as Bab's goobledegook virus.

Irk of homework

NOW imagine, you've just settled down to watch an EastEnders wedding and suddenly the front door goes. There's your boss, standing there on the step like a sullen Avon lady holding an arm full of files.

Listen, he says, can you do this lot by tomorrow?

I bet I can guess what you'd say.

Homeworks sucks, whether it's a boss pulling a fast one, or in your kid's backpack. I have never seen the point of it.

All over the country, tired parents suddenly find that someone has decided a nice end to the working day would be fourteen long division sums, which does family values no end of good as mum and dad start either competing aggressively to complete the most, or arguing tearfully about who should help.

Homework is a menace. For one thing, it's encouraging kids to think that working at home out of hours is A Good Thing. It is not. Later in life, this is called Being Taken For A Mug. And just how much of the work the teacher sees is done by the junior genius? Surely teachers have enough on their plates without marking maths done by dad? And sitting in virtually every home these days is the greatest help in the world. It is called Google.

Worst of all, homework makes learning a hideous chore. When I was a kid, mum and dad packed us in the Morris Minor and we did museums, galleries and exhibitions. We learned all the time. What I know about Egyptian mummies and diagonally mounted triple expansion reciprocating engines, I learned on Sundays at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and bank holidays on the Waverley. I cannot recall a single word of a German ink exercise.

Oh, I know there are parents out there who don't endorse lifelong learning, or any learning in fact. Homework here is left airily undone, which keeps the telly viewing undisturbed, but sets up another flashpoint between unruly kids and hard pressed teachers.

No-one should be forced to work for free, whether teacher, parent or child. I am aware, however, that ending homework will deprive virtually every dog in the Scotland of its favourite snack. Sorry Rover.