Listen, if you’re a farmer or a deck-builder, or someone who doesn’t own a computer, just stop reading right now. None of this is going to make any sense to you and I am eternally jealous. For the rest of you, over the past two and a half years of the pandemic, and likely long before, you’ve become intimately familiar with “Zoom calls” or “Teams calls” or “Google calls” or video calls of some sort. We have gotten our work lives tied to them. We’ve gotten our educational lives tied to them. We even have our outside lives tied to them thanks to coaches and neighborhood group meetings moving to these telecommunication tools.
Don’t get me wrong, these are marvels of technology. To be able to communicate and collaborate with video and audio from a world away nearly-instantaneously is nothing short of miraculous. So why, after nearly three years for some and many more years for most, are we still so bad at it?
We still after all this time start talking while we’re on mute. We still after all this time forget to unmute ourselves and expose the fact that we’re on the toilet or at the park with our kids or driving with the radio very loudly. We still after all this time continue to turn our cameras on when we thought they were off or vice versa. Why haven’t we learned?
My son got his driver’s license three years ago and he is a much better driver today than he was on his 16th birthday. A high school senior has loads more confidence and educational acumen than a high school sophomore. You’re a better husband or wife three years into your marriage than you were on your wedding day. You get my point.
So why have I just spent the last hour on a call that had at least nine items on the “Zoom call Bingo” sheet of Zoom calls? Sorry, I was on mute.
Baby crying in the background. Oh, I was showing the wrong screen. Oh, I was showing the wrong document. Oh, I didn’t invite the right person, let me spend five minutes to see if he’s here.
Many companies are done with the dark comedy of the Zoom call, but their solution is flawed. They feel forcing everyone back to a home office will resolve these issues. They won’t. Nearly any corporation is at least regional in scale, and most are global. Even if you force everyone to an office, they still sit on conference calls all day. Sure, you might get more chatter about this weekend’s football game around the water cooler – and there’s some value to that – but you aren’t making anybody more productive.
The next solution on the horizon would be virtual reality meetings. Facebook’s Meta solution where you wear goggles, although I cannot imagine that’s going to take off any time soon – especially if you have to wear a toaster on your face to participate.
In the meantime, there seems to be no end in sight for fighting with Polycom speaker phones, and trying to project your presentation onto the Microsoft Team’s screen and screaming at your kids while forgetting to mute yourself – but this is the hellscape we find ourselves in right now.
And for those of you without computers or with jobs where you don’t have to be on these calls day in and day out, just pretend this whole time I was on mute.
(Chris Kamler is rarely on mute on Twitter, where you can find him as @TheFakeNed)