Awkward moments in virtual meetings

Many companies all over the world have sent their employees home in an effort to curb the spread of coronavirus.

As a result, many businesses are relying on remote conferencing tools such as Zoom, which was little known before this virus came calling.

I remember laughing hard after viewing a video that has been doing rounds of a woman in the United States who answered the call of nature while on a virtual meeting, dressing gown, slippers and all, unaware that her colleagues could see her.

As she did her thing, her workmates could be seen unsuccessfully trying to stifle laughter. By the time the poor woman discovered her blunder, it was too late.

Well, on Tuesday last week, I attended my first virtual meeting, and I can tell you that it was a baptism by fire.

Like any wise employee, I had downloaded Zoom the previous evening and familiarised myself with how it worked, determined to avoid looking like a fool.

BAPTISM BY FIRE

That morning, I prepared myself as if I were going to work, every hair in place and all. As it turns out, I still managed to look like a fool.

I managed to tune into the meeting, and even got the video running. But for the life of me, I couldn’t get the audio to work, so there I was, looking at people’s mouths moving but couldn’t hear what they were saying, yet trying hard not to show it as I fumbled with my phone, which I had unwisely decided to use, rather than the laptop.

I had propped my mobile phone on a pillow, and as fate would have it, it fell, pointing to the door. Or was it the ceiling?

By then, I was in panic, wondering how to shut off the video because my colleagues must have been witnessing the debacle.

Eventually, I covered the screen with my hand as I tried to get myself to calm down so that I could think straight. I must have fumbled with that phone for about 30 minutes.

Eventually, I managed to switch off video and get audio up, only to hear my boss ask, “Who is Huawei?”

Turns out that when you log on, you must feed your name into some slot so that everyone can know who’s speaking.

Well, I didn’t know that, so I hadn’t – and that is how, dear reader, everyone got to know that my phone is a Chinese make.

COMIC RELIEF

I was almost starting to sweat with embarrassment when, and thank God for small mercies, when someone’s phone began to ring.

He should have muted the ringtone, but he didn’t – the ringtone was a rather raunchy song by some Tanzanian musician, which went on and on, probably because he had no idea how to reject the call.

And right there was the comic relief everyone in that tense meeting needed because we all burst out laughing.

I would later learn that I and the colleague with a sexually explicit song for a ringtone are not the only ones struggling.

A colleague from another section was recently telling a couple of us how one of them had placed his laptop at an angle that showed almost his entire living room.

Nothing wrong with this, one would argue, only that he was yet to unhang the Christmas decorations from last year.

This isolation is forcing those of us that were born long before the age of the internet to fully embrace technology, to discover a world beyond WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook, a world full of possibilities, possibilities that will change the way we work for good.

The writer is Editor, Society & Magazines, Daily Nation; [email protected]; @cnjerius