Day 8: The Day No One Laughed

4/8/2020 (Permalink)

Day 8

They have all been exposed.

Every one of them.

The smiles, the chuckles, even the belly laughs...

Each morning, we hold the Work-In-Progress meeting, and until last week they happened around a white table in our conference room. I cannot help myself from making a joke or two. Admittedly, some of the attempts at humor are not good, but complete bombs are rare – at least that is what I thought.

The in-person meeting brings at least a few laughs, but attempting jokes on Zoom meetings is a different beast. They generate nothing. I think everyone might have been pretending to laugh the whole time. Maybe it was just a pity laugh - ugh, the worst kind.

In their defense, they have a variety of excuses to choose from to explain the crickets. “I did laugh but I was on mute and by the time I could unmute the subject had moved on.” Or, “I was laughing but the internet connection was unstable and I had to reboot my internet browser,” “I accidentally hit ‘leave meeting’ because I was laughing so hard,” “You cannot see me laughing because my hand is in front of my face and I am muted.”

Lastly, “No, you are right I am not laughing because it was not funny anyway and it is annoying being on this Zoom call wishing three other people on this call would understand what the mute button actually accomplishes so forgive me, nothing is actually funny right now.”

All this time I misread the crowd, I guess they really are the more serious type. Maybe I should look into introducing complex spreadsheets into our Zoom meeting and ask everyone to take part in explaining a different section. That actually sounds worse.

On the bright side, without all the fake laughs, now our WIP meetings should really zoom.

Terrible, I know. I do see their point, I have to get better.