There’s a New Yorker cartoon where people are sitting around a conference table and someone says: “You say it’s a win-win, but what if you’re wrong-wrong and it all goes bad-bad?”

I’ve been to those meetings.

They drone on and on. You just want to slit your wrists so that you have an excuse to go to the bathroom.

I’m sorry to say I have no solution to interminable meetings.  But you may want to check out a nifty Web solution that can help you avoid a two-hour commute for a meeting that lasts 20 minutes.

GoToMeeting.com is one of several sites offering a way to connect with people across town or around the globe and it is one of the simplest setups I’ve seen. You can sign up for a 30-day trial and test it yourself immediately.

If you’re convening a meeting, you send invitations that include a URL for the presentation, the audio phone number and an access code. Come time for the meeting, participants go to the Web address and call into the phone number. There is no elaborate pre-registration. Only those you invite get access to the URL and access code. GoToMeeting claims the online sessions are secure and encrypted.

Once you’re all in, the presenter switches the computer view to his or her screen and everyone can see the pie charts, competitors’ Web sites or whatever else can be shown on a computer screen and you can talk to each other. Presentations, demonstrations and collaborations, including the sharing of documents, are all possible with GoToMeeting.

There are different pricing plans depending on how much meeting power you need. The cheapest monthly plan is $49 and includes unlimited meetings for up to 15 attendees. Other products, including the better-known Webinar service, scales up from there. You can also avoid phone charges with GoToMeeting’s VoIP option. Not least of all, the service  is now compatible with Macs as well as PCs.

We ran into one hitch when testing the service. Black boxes appeared on the computer screen of Andreas Arvman, our digital content editor and faux meeting participant. The boxes obscured some of the content that I was showing on my screen.  But I suspect it’s a browser issue, so we’ll be testing it in different browsers.

Let me know your experiences with this meeting service. And, while you are at it, tell me your favorite excuse for avoiding a meeting. Here’s mine: “My dog ate my PowerPoint.”