Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance ...

If you have a security peephole in your door, make sure that the dogs can't reach it ...

Meetings. Mankind has held meetings ever since Mammoth PLC first made a hostile take-over bid for Barratt Caves Ltd and they were all called to account before the Dinosaur Marketing Board.

At first we held them face to face to face to knuckle to knee to A&E.

Then someone invented the telephone and we all conference called ourselves into a frenzy of dialling tones. In offices the world over important people (usually by their own admission and account) yacked on for hour after hour and only when they paused for their applause did they realise that all the other teleconference participants had long since hung up or been disconnected. Satellites became involved and before you it knew delay lag time involved Atlantic mixed crackle confusion pause. Then some silly twerp improved satellites and international phone calls and that took all of the fun out of that.

Then someone invented the Interrossiter or "Video Conference" machinings please to not touch ze buttons. We liked those. They brought all of the nonsense back into a chap's working life, for a while...

The first "it's expensive rocket science" system used at one place I worked involved a couple of colour televisions and a karaoke microphone - and a load of wiring. Sophisticated it wasn't. There were boxes of electronics for this and bags of spare parts for that and someone had to spend ten minutes hooking up the connections at the start and, crucially, ten minutes unhooking the connections at the end of each meeting ...

Our first meeting using the new-fangled rocket science was a difficult one. It would have been difficult face to face. We compromised on time zones and inconvenienced both parties, just to be fair. Barter, business and big balloons that had gone up were negotiated over three long hours with a dozen high-fallutin' people sitting around their conference desk and a dozen tanked-up, cowboy yee-hah fakes hamming it up for all we were worth on our end, around our polished walnut conference desk. Contracts were hammered out, money was agreed, responsibilities divided and the meeting brought to a close by the firing of guns, the offering of maternal insults and the lobbing of dead cats into the air. Phew! Hallelujah!

Then [one of our team], anxious to get to the pub, stood up and commented loudly "For [very rude expletive]'s sake! They were a bunch of [R-Souls] and [Merchant Bankers] weren't they? I'm glad we stiffed them over x, y  and z. I need a [serious expletive]ing drink ..."

Unfortunately, the link, the cameras, the microphones and the nice folk on the receiving end were all very much still "live" as they say in television studios. We were treated to a big-screen view of their entire team stiffening into silence and peering at all of us back down their camera... oops. They'd heard and seen every single word of [one of our team]'s summation of them ...

Still, once we'd all got new jobs and had a nice funeral for the boss (something to do with apoplexy apparently), things got better.

At my next company the cutting edge rocket science video conferencing suites all boasted expensive conference tables, mood lighting - and cameras and microphones that could be zoomed in on whoever was talking. There were little joysticks and the cameras could be controlled remotely from either end, they could change their angle of view of us and we could zip the camera all around their conference suite too. Very Star Trek indeed at the time. A little slow and clunky, but it got the job done nicely. Usually.

Well, the second or third meeting in there was boring. Very, very, very boring indeed with the "opposition" doing most of the talking. My Scandinavian boss was a chap of high testosterone levels, little morals and absolutely no restraint or political correctness. He started playing with the joystick that controlled the camera at the "remote" end. In particular he began to follow around and zoom in on a rather splendid young lady on the other company's team. A blonde - his favourite female intellectual talent in all the whole wide adolescent computer-world. In particular he admired the logic and attention to detail shown by her extremely ample breasts. When she moved doing "pointing at my presentation" and "here ist das chartings" things he toggled the joystick and followed her around. When she sat again he looked her up and down on-screen and then he focussed in on her cleavage, testing how close the camera could get him and all the while the voice of the chairman droned on and on and on ...

... until he stopped droning. What my boss hadn't remembered was that the little camera/microphones were actually physically moving, they were motorised, buzzing as they zoomed in and lenses extended, microphones flailing like little antennae. They didn't move far but they did swivel, tilt, turn and extend themselves out a bit from their stands in a very obvious way ...

The meeting was called to a halt and my boss was called to account - it seems that the folk in the "remote" part of the conference had grown weary of the little camera following and zooming in on the breasts of their chief technical expert. Especially when it was so obviously to the exclusion of all else going on.

The technology has moved on again since then, but there's still no safeguard against adolescent testosterone and boredom. Or the Scandinavian temperament. I suppose that it was at least an advancement upon Chinese Whispers!