Meetings- blech

I am a non meetings kind of girl. Ever since I can remember I have hated meetings. Hashing out the details, listening to everyone's two cents, subjects and thoughts drifting mercilessly off course and time wasted on droning or irrelevant topics...these are things I can live without. The main problem with groups in general, I think, is that people really like to hear themselves talk. This can lead to people saying the same thing, only phrased many different ways, or even repeated over and over in almost the same words. The other strange thing about meetings is how everyone seems to think their time is so important and they have so much to do, yet, they are willing to be as completely non-succinct as possible. They take time to interject their unrelated stories, usually about how busy they are. I rarely speak at meetings. If I do, it's a brief sentence. I try to avoid them altogether. They make me want to explode. I did explode once in college during a meeting of all the dorm monitors from my dorm. We got together with the dorm mom every so often to discuss this and that. This particular evening I had a huge amount of studying that needed to be done and there I sat wasting my time at 11 PM as these girls went on and on giving their opinions about the proposed building of a new dorm somewhere that had not even begun and was not even related to our meeting at all. I finally blurted something out about how I didn't care about that at all and if we were done discussing relevant topics I would leave the meeting to go study. Everyone looked at me aghast. The dorm mother was quite disapproving, told me that this was an important topic being discussed, and scolded me. Maybe I should have phrased it differently. I don't regret calling it for what it was though- a waste of time. I guess I'm not corporate material.