A few times a week, I find myself on a Zoom call. Sometimes it's with friends or family, sometimes my writers' group, sometimes a client, sometimes a volunteer something-or-other. Other than the fact that I haven't been able to figure out how to make my face appear in a color other than bubble-gum pink, I'm fine with Zoom and prefer seeing people's faces to a purely audio gathering.
But I really feel for the Zoom fatigue that a lot of folks who work fulltime are experiencing.
Admittedly, for some of them, all the pandemic has done is shift meetings from in-person to online. So Zooming may not be all that much more exhausting than business as usual.
I worked for several years in a company that had an incredibly intense meeting culture, where director level employees and above just went non-stop. (I was a director.) Some days, you could be in meetings from 7:30 in the morning until 7:30 in the evening - non-stop. Bathroom breaks had to be tucked in between meetings. And if you're wondering about a break for lunch, wonder no more. Most meetings at this company included food.
A 7:30 a.m. meeting - admittedly rare, but they did occasionally happen - would include a full breakfast (as in bacon and eggs, pancakes, or the like) "catered" by the cafeteria. At any meeting held between 8 and 10, you were pretty much guaranteed coffee/tea, juice, muffins and/or bagels. Later morning meetings were pretty much food free: coffee and tea only.
Noon meetings were feasts: salads, sandwiches, chips, cookies, brownies, sodas... The admins, who ordered the food, figured out pretty pretty quickly that leftover food was put out for all to share. Thus, if a meeting had 6 attendees, they'd order for 10 - just to make sure there was something to go around.
Mid-afternoon meetings all came with cookies, brownies, candy bars, sodas and water. Our offices were in spread out over three buildings, and I remember going to one meeting where most of the attendees ended up calling in. So a meeting for 12 had only 4 in person attendees.
To make sure we didn't starve to death, the admin had ordered two ginormous pastry trays, including a raft of petit fours. Plus 2 candy bars for attendees. And waters and sodas to wash it all down with. Truly, what was set out would have catered a small wedding.
Somewhere along the line, a new president blew into town, started attending a few food-clogged meetings and called an end to the food fest.
Just as well. We often talked about The Genuity 15: the 15 pounds you gained the first year you worked there.
I had worked in other meeting cultures before, but nothing quite like Genuity.
After a while, I started to send delegates to some of the meetings rather than go myself. This was considered a major insult, but sometimes I just needed a break. Of course, I was cagey enough to only send a delegate to a meeting conducted by a peer director, or an adjacent VP level person who I had no direct or dotted-line relationship with. SVP, EVP, President: I was going to be there.
It was monumentally exhausting, as a meeting wound down, to check your Palm Pilot to see where your next meeting was going to be held. On the hour, you'd see dozens of my fellow meeting weary colleagues clogging the corridors, hustling to whatever was next up. Like high school, only with no books to carry, no lockers to stop at.
Would this be any more exhausting on Zoom? Probably not, but still terrible.
For others, working remotely has meant more meetings. Things that used to get taken care of on a chance encounter by the coffee machine or a just-sticking-my-head-in-to-ask now mean a meeting. Management by walking around, when managers could just roam around for informal check-ins, doesn't work when the walking round could be across many miles and end up with the manager standing 6 feet away from their employee's front door, communicating through masks.
Now informal meetings are Zoomed.
And Zoom meetings can bring on anxiety that's absent from in-person ones. At work-work, everyone's more or less dressed up to begin with. On Zoom, if you have a work-appropriate top on, you have to worry about getting up and revealing that you're still in your PJ bottoms.
Then there are the unscheduled guest appearances by kids, spouses, and pets to worry about.
Not to mention worrying about your messy home "office." Or whether you want your colleagues seeing where and how you live to begin with. Who wants everyone rating your room? Oh, you can always swap in a better background, but if you don't know what you're doing with green screens or whatever, you can end up looking like your head is detached from your bodies. Or waving your hands that are no longer connected to your arms.
Layer on the colossal stress we've all been under for the past year, and no wonder people are Zoomed out.
Enter Zoom Escaper, the brainchild/labor of love of artist Sam Lavigne. It's a free app that let's you add sound effects to your calls that can give you an excuse to exit the meeting room - all under the guise of not wanting to annoy the other attendees.
Construction sounds. Bad connection. Echo. Wind. Man weeping. Urination. Barking dog. Upset baby.
Construction noise can be overwhelming. I know this up close and personal, having lived through major reno in the buildings on either side of me. Drilling and hammering seem like a reasonably good excuse for leaving a meeting, putting your drown-out-the-noise earbuds in and getting back to working from home.
Bad connection and echo are excellent excuses, but you can't use them all that often before someone who's running these meetings is going to expect you to do something about it.
Wind would, I guess, work. When there's window rattling, it can be annoying, that's for sure. Just beware that your colleagues, not to mention your boss, can easily pull up a weather app and see whether there's actually anything windy happening in your zip code.
Not that there's anything funny about a man weeping, but man weeping is, I'm guessing, just there for the laugh. Maybe it's a good excuse to leave a meeting, but who wants anyone nosing around trying to figure out why you're dealing with a weeping man. Sure, it could be a neighbor in need, but, seriously, who wants anyone up in their personal business?
And speaking of personal business, I do not see how the sound of urination does anything but suggest that you're either a crass pig who's carried their laptop or phone into the bathroom with them, or someone too careless or dense to put their microphone on mute before they head off to pee. (Pro tip: if you close the bathroom door, unless you have the world's thinnest walls and/or pee like a racehorse, no one's going to hear you going. Wait to flush until the meeting's over.)
Barking dog seems like a good and evergreen excuse. It doesn't have to be your barking dog. It can be the barking dog upstairs. Or outside your window. But unfortunately barking dog, unless you're going to do something about it, just calls for you to put your mic on mute, not bolt the meeting entirely.
Crying baby only works if you actually have a crying baby to attend to.
And none of this really works if you're the one running the endless meetings. (Or does it??? No one will complain if once in a while you end a meeting early. Game called on account of man weeping. Or urination.)
Anyway, not that there are many/any folks who are actually going to use this app. But what a fun distraction in these Zoomed up times. Thank you, Sam Lavigne, for giving the over-meetinged masses an LOL moment.
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Source of info: The Verge
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