I was a Department head for a Fortune 200 for several years before I retired. One of my primary duties was attending meetings - Staff meetings with my VP, meeting with vendors, project status meetings, HR meetings rolling out the latest regulations, committee meetings, budget meetings, standards meeting, planning meetings with other divisions of the company, and on and on. Some of these meeting were moderately useful but most took about twice as much time as necessary. One of the biggest time wasters that I never did but usually there were one or two that would do, just annoyed the hell out of me and others who were there to discuss company matters.

Right in the middle of the meeting, someone would just call up their dad and put him on a speaker phone. They would shoot the breeze about the weather and sports while the rest of use just chilled eagerly waiting for the call to end so we could get back to business. Happened all the time, completely normal, nothing unusual about it.

How about others here? If you were in big business, I'll bet this was a common occurrence in your company meetings too.