My boss ordered me to take his place at a meeting.

The ‘No Knives Better Lives’ campaign was an initiative being rolled out to the most violent areas of Scotland. Now it was coming our beat. There had been an initial advance party to see if our area deserved their attention. I sat in on the first meeting expecting to pass a pleasant twenty minutes before everyone accepted we didn’t have a knife problem.

The meeting lasted for four hours, and I contributed every fifteen minutes by saying, “We don’t have a knife problem here.”

After three hours and fifty-five minutes talking it through they all agreed we didn’t have a knife problem in the area.

“Why don’t we try it, anyway?” someone suggested.

And that was what they did. They were going to experiment with it in our area. What nonsense. We didn’t have a knife problem, but they were going waste time and money on an initiative anyway.

The partners included a local councillor, who liked the sound of his own voice. The head social worker, who liked the sound of her own voice. A deputy head social worker, who liked the sound of his own voice. A community worker, who liked the sound of her own voice. A member of the neighbourhood watch, who liked the sound of his own voice. A community sergeant, who liked the sound of his own voice. The head of the neighbourhood planning forum, who liked the sound of his own voice.

I think I might have missed a couple, but you get the picture.

So there I was stuck again. Instructed to sit through another excruciatingly mundane and endless meeting. If there is one thing that impedes work — it’s a meeting.

“Who is chairing the meeting?” I asked in the desperate hope it wasn’t Chief Inspector Maurice Minor.

Chief Inspector Maurice Minor was the single most practised person I knew in the art of ‘Management speak’. However simple the point he was making, it came out of his mouth in the most convoluted, overly elaborate and ridiculous phrase you could imagine.

“Chief Inspector Maurice Minor,”

I formed my fingers into the shape of a gun, stuck my hand to the roof of my mouth and pulled the trigger. My boss rubbed his hands together with glee.

The meeting was due to start in ten minutes. I headed off to find a kettle to make the strongest coffee, strong enough to stand a spoon upright. I would need it.

Perhaps it was the coffee, but by the time I had made my way back to the meeting room, I’d had an idea. Chief Inspector Minor was already there, sitting at the head of the table. I pulled up a chair to the left of him and sat down. I got out my large A4 pad of paper and pointedly scribed a large heading in the centre of my page:-

‘W. SPEAK’

Then I drew two columns. At the top of the first column, I wrote,

‘CHIEF INSPECTOR MINOR’

and at the top of the second column, I wrote:-

‘EVERYONE ELSE’

Chief Inspector Maurice Minor looked up from his paperwork, and his eyes landed on my handiwork.

“What’s that mean?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing!”

The rest of the attendees dribbled in and took a seat. Chief Inspector Minor got the meeting underway.

“Okay, thank you for coming. It is good to see we have the right people on the bus, everyone is sitting in the front seats, and we are ready to push the accelerator.”

Animatedly, I picked up my pen and put a large tick in the left column under the heading ‘CHIEF INSPECTOR MINOR’.

He continued, “As you are all aware there is a piece of work ongoing at the moment around the ‘No Knives Better Lives’ campaign but we don’t want to have paralysis by analysis. There is no I in TEAM, so I’d like you all to run your ideas up the flagpole and kick off the game. There is light at the end of the tunnel in the life-cycle of our partnership.”

I returned to his column and gave it another five ticks. Chief Inspector Minor saw the ticks mounting up in his column. Flustered, he had a breather before carrying on.

“Perhaps I will pause there and let everyone around the table give their input; I’m always open to feedback.”

I notched another two ticks in his column.

There was a cacophony of voices from the partners as every one of the ‘like the sound of their own voice’ brigade tried to get in first. The result was just a rabble that continued until Chief Inspector Minor brought them to order with the suggestion they give everyone a chance by going round the table in a clockwise direction.

The local councillor was first. For the next fifteen minutes, he waffled on about nothing. The gist of his long-winded dialogue was he had given the campaign ‘priority thought’ which was to say he had done diddly squat since the last meeting. Maybe he had thought about it, but even that was debatable. The local councillor achieved the first tick in the ‘EVERYONE ELSE’ column.

Chief Inspector Minor listened intently and summarised his contribution with, “That’s great. Clearly, there is a bit of work still going on, and that is a positive step in the right direction for everyone.”

I gave him another two ticks in his column.

Next up was the head social worker. She went on at great length as to the benefits of the ‘No Knives Better Lives’ campaign and gushed over how the campaign will have a positive effect on her clientele.

She earned two ticks in the ‘EVERYONE ELSE’ column.

Chief Inspector Minor was as impressed with her as the councillor, quick to praise her efforts when she finished.

“That’s wonderful. We get the picture that this was just meant to be. It is a case of working smarter not harder.”

The CHIEF INSPECTOR MINOR column received a further two ticks, and that was enough to put him right off his next thought.

“I can’t think when you do that!” he said to me, and then to everyone else he explained, “He is noting down every time I say something wankery. Oh my god! I can’t think.”

I struggled to hold myself together. I had to purse my lips and pinch my leg under the table to prevent myself from bursting into laughter.

This just might be a worthwhile meeting after all.

It didn’t stop him, though, or any of the others. The meeting continued for another two hours. The upshot of the whole thing; they decided to daub the town's pavements with chalked stencils that said, ‘No Knives Better Lives’.

I wonder how much of a difference it made? What self-respecting knife-wielding youth would come across a stencil on the pavement and think, ‘shit, I better get rid of this blade in my pocket?’