Early Risers Keep Dominating The Company’s Meeting Schedules, So Clever Employees Flood Their Calendars With Other Meetings To Stop Their Shenanigans

It can be frustrating when a so-called “democratic” vote only serves the majority.

So, what would you do if your company’s early risers always voted for 8 AM meetings, ignoring your requests for a later start?

Would you just go along with it? Or would you come up with a good way to get them back?

In the following story, a group of employees found themselves in this very situation and decided to fight back. Here’s what happened.

The Tyranny of the Majority is not a Democracy

The dilemma: Our company has flexible working hours, and some of us who are late sleepers or have to take care of small children in the morning will not start work before 9 or 10 AM.

Unfortunately one department we work with has their entire management level filled with early risers who just love to set up early morning meetings.

Do we need another weekly meeting to discuss current operations? How about 8 AM on Monday? Let’s vote on it!

The majority always wins.

The early risers are the majority, our arguments are disregarded, and their boss says: “Well, we voted for it, and the majority believes that 8 AM is the best time. You’ll have to adjust. That’s how democracy works!” OK, he’s right. If your name is Orban or Erdogan or Duterte, then that is how democracy works. Majority good, minority bad, down with the minority!

Recently, the number of topics started to exceed the capacity of that meeting, so it was decided to have another weekly meeting to deal with the rest. We asked for nothing more than to schedule the new meeting after 10 AM.

But, he said with a smirk, “That’s for the majority to decide! I’ll ask my assistant to schedule a new meeting that fits into everyone’s schedule.” He knew that the assistant would ignore any morning blockers that were not actual meetings.

Since the assistant was gone for the day, they scheduled their own meetings.

Time for some malicious compliance!

Since the assistant had already left (early risers…), the opposing forces gathered and started to invent new weekly and daily meetings for our department.

Now, we had early morning meetings every day, a daily meeting just after the early riser’s lunch break (we prefer to eat later), and various other weekly meetings that blocked other important time slots.

Here’s where it all worked out for them.

Today, the assistant surprised the department head with her new meeting proposal for a mid-afternoon, just before he usually leaves (and likes to leave a bit earlier), since all earlier slots were already blocked.

I know for sure that he suspects foul play, but our team has joined the effort, and even my boss has claimed that she’s only seeing valid entries in our calendars. The people’s democratic resistance works. Take that, tyrannical pretenders! 😉

We’ll probably wait another two or three weeks before we delete the dummies from our calendars.

Wow! That was an elaborate and impressive scheme to get their way!

Let’s see how the readers over at Reddit relate to this story.

As this person mentions, the majority always wins in a democracy.

Here was a much easier idea.

Well, that’s one way to look at it.

This person doesn’t agree with the trick.

Sounds like they need a new system.

The company should either get rid of flex hours or find a time that works for everyone because this just holds up progress.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.