Hunt expected a perfunctory meeting, but it turned out to be "unlike any interview I ever had," he recalls.
"We had one perfunctory meeting with E.P.A., basically going over the status of the process," said Stephen D. Ramsey, G.E.'s vice president for environmental programs.
"It was a pretty perfunctory meeting" in a small conference room, said the Rev. David M. Schilling, director of global corporate accountability at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility in New York.
These were actually perfunctory open meetings that made no changes to the overall plan.
This year the regime curtailed even the perfunctory annual meeting of its parliament, the National People's Congress NPCC), preferring to confine discussion to back-rooms and obscure internet forums.
For him, this was not a pro forma, perfunctory process: Those meetings were much more than "a juridical exercise in naming all the risks as quickly as possible, like the voiceover in an ad for a new pharmaceutical".
"There's no such thing as a perfunctory compensation committee meeting anymore," said Gary M. Locke, global practice leader in executive compensation for Towers Perrin, the consulting firm.
Most of the time, the meeting is perfunctory: a quick review of the TV basics, like the standard practice of having five commercials a quarter.
A spokesman for Mr. Thompson says the meeting was perfunctory and no different from any other hospitality session with groups like the Kiwanis Club.
Yet after the demonstrative murder of Markelov and Baburova, no Russian official attended the victims' funerals, and both Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin remained silent for nine days before Medvedev expressed perfunctory regrets in a meeting with Dmitri Muratov, editor of Novaya Gazeta, and Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the newspaper's shareholders.
