Last Wednesday I sat in the longest meeting of my life. It was a “briefing” (HA!) to inform my division chief of what my team has been working on for the past month.  It was simply an informational meeting, which means there were no conflicts, no problems that needed to be hammered out, no decisions to be made. Just talking.

And I slept through most of it. Really, I’m not joking.  Doodling didn’t help, excusing myself and taking a walk around the office didn’t help, trying to speak up in the meeting didn’t help.  As soon as my mouth closed, so did my eyes.

I remember thinking after the second hour, “Oh my God, I’m going to get fired because I slept through the first meeting I’ve attended.”

After the third hour, I remember thinking, “Why can’t I keep my eyes open? I should be able to control this!”

And after the fourth hour, I just thought, “Oh screw it. This meeting is stupid anyway.”

And since I wrote most of the briefing material (but my boss did all the talking) I wasn’t missing anything important.

Funnily enough, the meeting started out with the usual southern small talk, which I will never understand. Just get to business, already!

Wanna know what was the small talk subject matter of the day?

Farm animals. My division chief shared a story about having goats on his farm and how he used to feed the goats to his kids for dinner—and how they would get sick after finding out that they were eating Cappy or Billy or whatever other ridiculous names that they gave to the goats.

Then my boss contributed a story about her study abroad in Mexico. Apparently she killed goats, cows and chickens. Guess what? Cows cry just before they die.  COWS KNOW.  My boss said that every time they would get a cow from the pasture and separate it from the herd it would start to cry.  And when they would take it to the killing place (whatever that’s called) it would look back at them and cry harder. She even demonstrated how they sound.  How sad is that?  Pretty eff-ing sad, if you ask me.

But you know what? I don’t think that story made me sad enough to stop eating steak, though.