How to Create Multiple Calendar Exceptions Which Occasionally Coincide

Question

Ok so here's my situation
I have a group of schedules that currently have technical work and routine meetings and I am working in Project Standard 2010.  I am not a fan of including meetings in technical schedules especially the recurring variety that represent informal tag-ups.
 However, the team that is working the actual schedule has a significant portion of their work day captured by meetings.  They want to be able to resource level, but they have to also be able to show the impact of their meeting obligations on their
ability to complete technical work.
So originally I was going to have these meetings entered as recurring events in the schedule; their periodicities were various.  Some meetings were daily, some weekly, some monthly.  But it became clear to me that this approach was going to become
unsustainable.  With schedules that extend out a full calendar year, the daily and weekly meetings in particular became voluminous numbering in the thousands; in some cases representing 2/3 of all the schedule activities.  
This makes timely tacking, updating, and statusing of these schedules un-achievable.  I searched on the web and was given a clever suggestion: to create a resource calendar with recurring exceptions that represented meeting obligations for a resource.
I liked the idea but there was a problem.  When I was testing the idea I wanted to see what would happen if a resource had multiple exceptions (representing multiple meetings) that coincided on the same day.  Would Project recognize all of the
exceptions?  So I created a resource named "Bob" and gave him
-a daily exception with a work day defined from 9:00-12:00 and 1:00-5:00 (to represent an 8:00 hourly meeting)
-a weekly exception with a work day defined from 8:00-12:00 and 1:00-4:00 (to represent a 4:00 hourly meeting)
-a monthly exception with a work day defined from 8:00-11:00 and 1:00-5:00 (to represent an 11:00 hourly meeting)
I ensured that the weekly and monthly exceptions happened on Mondays, and then I found a Monday were all 3 exceptions would be in effect.  I schedule an activity to begin on the date, and then applied Bob to that activity.  Then I went to the Resource
Usage view to Bob's hours, and instead of reflecting that Bob could only do 5 hours of work, it showed that Bob could do 7 hours of work.
It appeared that Project 2010 would only honor one exception at a time, and it appeared to do it in a hierarchy... first daily exceptions, then monthly exceptions, then weekly exceptions.  Is that simply how it works in Project 2010?  Can only
one exception be honored at a time?  And if there are coinciding exceptions, does Project 2010 start with the daily exception first?

Answer 1

Guillaume,
Most people who have familiarity with scheduling agree with John, you, and myself; that the attempt to schedule, track,
status, and update routine meetings is probably ill-advised.  I thought about doing something a long the lines of what you are suggesting (if for no other reason because it would make my life easier) to just reduce their percentage availability.  
I may ultimately present that also as an alternative.  My solution right now is to create exceptions to the
exception.  Meaning: If I have a daily, weekly, and monthly exception, then I consider my daily meeting to be "The Exception" (because it has the highest frequency of occurrence), and my weekly and monthly meetings are exceptions to "The Exception".  On
the days when a weekly and/or monthly meeting coincide with a daily meeting, I just add all of their outages together and create an exception to "The Exception" on that day.  Theoretically this should work,  I was just hoping for a more elegant solution.
 I was hoping someone would say, "oh yeah, you just go to options and select 'Merge Exceptions' and you're good to go".