I must be the only person in Australasia that’s got worse at Zoom meetings since the lockdown. I’d done several in the first few months of this year with hardly any problems. There were the occasional dogs or children yapping, unexpected glimpses I gave other attendees of the view out of my windows, and I always looked much worse than everyone else, but nothing too bad. I take no blame for that time my head took up the entire screen of the meeting room. (“Oh My God, Kirsty, you’re enormous!”)
More recent meetings have been fraught with difficulties. Last Tuesday I logged in but couldn’t hear or see anything that was going on, in spite of my computer telling me I was present. I had to give up and phone in instead. Then on Thursday I thought I’d bypass the computer and get into the meeting directly by phone, to reduce the risk of anything going wrong. Unfortunately the zoom program didn’t automatically identify my phone as me, unlike the previous time, so my boss kept asking me to identify myself. I assumed also that my phone was on mute, so it was just lucky the microphone wasn’t powerful enough to pick up my muttered “FFS!” as I tried to figure out how to tell everyone who I was. I texted my boss in the end but it was a fraught few moments.
Tonight I decided to take no chances, and I joined the meeting early. Unfortunately it wasn’t until it had started that the computer decided to tell me the speaker was on the fritz. I had to quickly borrow my daughter’s computer, get it going and join the meeting, which took ten agonizing minutes. My daughter thinks that I have some powerful anti technological force within me that makes computers frightened and skittish, which is why nothing ever goes right. I did manage to join the meeting in the end, but under my daughter’s name. Plus I hadn’t had time to fix my hideous lockdown hairdo or optimize the camera angle, so once again I was the worst presented person on camera.
I’m not sure what the lesson is I’m supposed to have learnt from all this, which means I suppose I’m going to continue to be the weakest link at all the meetings I attend. At least next time I’ll brush my hair.