So, it had to happen. I am mounting the inanities of working virtually, full-on from the comfort of my very own living room. Many of you are likely in the same situation.
It’s game on. Virtual everything, pandemic be damned. Sixteen-hour days in virtual platform meetings with all types of people, some of whom I’ve never even met. All manner of technical challenges: from insufficient bandwidth to overloaded circuits, to the Ontario government sending out Amber-alert-like warnings about the COVID-19 virus across telephone networks, twice kicking me out of important calls.
Using video calling (Zoom, in my case) allows for both seeing and hearing meeting contributors under all types of circumstances. Reports from the field include colleagues attending Zoom calls from bed, head on a pillow. Maybe I could make a case for this before official office hours, but still, you’d have to have bullet-proof self-esteem to be seen in bed (without makeup) talking shop before 0800. How business has changed!
Other visuals? People coming to calls in their pyjamas, eating tacos (how is it always the same person?), and cats walking by the camera screen (okay, that was me). I can personally vouch for the Walmart report of tops outselling bottoms. A colleague stood on her chair during a recent meeting to let us see how the shorts on the bottom did not match the suit jacket on the top.
So, what is the single-best? One employee valiantly offered up her first experience with a Zoom call. Picture her in her living-room-turned-home-office with her computer, the backdrop, and her anxious face. Picture also her partner ‘in the wings’ fancying himself unseen, unbeknownst to her (and to him), flossing his teeth while he observed the call from the kitchen. He didn’t know. She didn’t know. But…everyone else knew. They saw it. All of them. And no one said a word.
So, what’s the message? There are two.
First, you might want to tell your partner not to floss within view of the computer screen during business hours on virtual business calls for the duration of the pandemic.
Second, join me against all odds, at all costs and under the most extraordinary circumstances of all times in finding at least some humour in the many demanding, stressful and sometimes even downright traumatic events of our days. Never have we experienced the collective challenges which continually emerge day-by-day.
For me? I live alone. But I have had a good long chat with my two cats about the perils of their flossing in front of my computer screen any time soon. At least until we resume business as usual. If indeed we ever do.
