Ça y est, Jean-Luc

Meeting culture: business meetings and poor hygiene don’t mix.

A frequent refrain among expats working in French offices relates to the cultural peculiarities surrounding business meetings.  The basic gripe goes like this: in a French office, you go to far too many meetings that go on for far too long, in which you endlessly discuss many angles of an issue without ever reaching a single conclusion about anything; then you schedule the next meeting and call it quits.  This is the extent of the office meeting culture that I had already heard about before coming to France.

What I didn’t know is how much fun it can be to be the outsider observing the dynamics of the meeting itself, not waiting for something to happen, but just relaxing and observing how, exactly, nothing happens at all.

But first, I must digress briefly to explain the role that I play in many of the meetings that I attend.  I have several bosses, most of whom give me the leeway to do my job independently with nothing more than an occasional stamp of approval from them.  But then there is one guy who has me work on his files and attend his meetings for one and only one reason: I am his trophy Anglo.

Some people have trophy horses, trophy cars or trophy wives, but what this guy has always wanted is a native-English-speaking subordinate to follow him around and be his trophy Anglo.  In the multilingual environment that we work in, it elevates him to a certain stature of seriousness that he would never attain on his own.  He conducts his meetings with counterparts in several languages and then, just to make the right impression, turns to me and says, in English, “can you get me numbers on that?” just to show them how stunningly he dominates the English tongue.  For some reason he has yet to notice that I’m just as much Mexican as American, which I hope won’t dawn on him for a while, since I enjoy tagging along and not having to do any real work.

But back to the meeting already in progress . . .

One thing I particularly enjoy is watching a room-full of investment bankers—typically 90% male, almost exclusively of the alpha variety—stake out their territory, even before they enter the room.  The most interesting psychological phenomenon (which is not necessarily uniquely French, but which I’ve seen a lot more of since arriving in Paris) is their counter-intuitive method of staking territory through the attire they wear.  In a room in which everyone expects everyone else to show up in a dark suit and serious tie, an alpha male showing up without a tie is saying ”I’m so important that I don’t care what you think.”  This is followed by the entry of another alpha male wearing no tie and perhaps no jacket either.  I’m waiting for this arms race of dressing down to turn into a strip show.  Then I’ll get to judge for myself who the big man really is.

A particularly delicious bit of irony that is unfortunately a recurring theme of the meetings I attend is a certain disregard for personal hygiene.  If you’ve never witnessed this yourself, then I imagine you won’t believe me, but I’ll tell you anyway: men in France pick their noses during business meetings.  Yeah, right, not all men do this . . . but a shockingly high proportion.

So the other day I was sitting in this big meeting with a dozen boring old men in dark suits and in struts the hunky young guy who takes a seat at the head of the table.  After a few minutes, I noticed that his nose was red, but didn’t think anything of it and I continued following the conversation around the room, bobbing my head back and forth mechanically as if I were watching a tennis match.  But then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught it: Mr. Hunk was picking his nose.  I turned and stared at him, aghast, in shock, only to watch as he pulled his finger out of his nose calmly and slowly, as if I had just caught him doing something as normal as, say, checking the time on his Rolex.

Back to the meeting in progress, I told myself.