COLUMBUS, Ohio — An employee of a Columbus insurance company who declined every one of the 37 meetings convened to select a new break-room coffee machine has formally demanded to be included in the decision, according to colleagues reached by phone, two of whom asked not to be named because they were still in the meeting.
Keith Larrabee, 51, a regional claims coordinator at Brenneman Mutual Insurance Group, sent his demand by reply-all at 4:52 p.m. Monday, eight minutes after the company’s Break Room Modernization Working Group announced that it had chosen a 12-cup drip model with a programmable timer. The email, sent to 212 recipients, read in full: “Was I consulted on this?”
“I just think it’s a little strange that something this important got decided without me,” Larrabee said by phone Tuesday. Asked whether he had received the invitations, Larrabee said he had received all of them, and had declined each one “because I was busy, and also because I assumed they’d loop me in at the end, which is when the deciding happens.”
According to calendar records reviewed by phone, Larrabee declined 25 of the meetings outright, marked 12 as “tentative,” and attended none. He also declined the working group’s three follow-up emails, a feat company IT staff said should not be technically possible with email. In response to his demand, the working group agreed Wednesday to hold a 38th meeting at which all 37 previous meetings would be replayed for him in sequence, at the original length, in Conference Room B. The session began at 8 a.m. Wednesday and, as of this writing, has reached the March meeting on carafe material. Larrabee has declined it, but the replay is proceeding anyway, and colleagues report that the meetings are going differently the second time, with the working group now leaning toward a French press and a chair in the room voting with Larrabee’s known positions, which it has developed on its own.
“There is no question he was included,” said Deb Szymanski, 44, the working group’s chair, who reached this reporter from Conference Room B. “He was included 37 times. He is being included right now. He is the most included person in this building.”
Dr. Marjorie Teller, director of the Center for Measured Outcomes, said the Center’s workplace survey found that 64.12 percent of demands for “a seat at the table” are filed by people who were sent a calendar invitation to the table and declined it. “The remaining 35.88 percent were not invited, and are, in our data, mostly correct,” Teller said. “Further study is needed.”
Prof. Desmond Achterberg, who holds the Prewitt Chair in Comparative Annoyance at Ellery State University, said the behavior has deep roots. “There was a delegate to a colonial assembly in 1774 who missed every session for nine months, arrived on the final morning, and asked whether anyone had considered tea,” Achterberg said. “They had. They had considered nothing else. The scholarship is clear on this, and I am the scholarship.”
Larrabee said Thursday that he respected the process and would accept the outcome, provided he was given an opportunity to share his concerns at a meeting dedicated to that purpose. The meeting has been scheduled for 2 p.m. Friday. He has marked it as tentative.
Glenn Whitacre filed this report by phone from the passenger seat of a shuttle bus that has circled the same rental-car facility since Tuesday.