Day 15: The Day My Zoom Reflection Made Me Reflective

4/22/2020 (Permalink)

The idea of the Zoom or Microsoft Teams conference video is to provide live stream with colleagues to make it feel like a real live meeting, where people are having conversations and collaborating. However, everyone appears to be staring at their own self. After a month of these calls, I am still trying to figure out why everyone else’s head looks so big on the screen but my head looks small in the picture. Does my head look big on their screen or is there something wrong with my head? Those thoughts quickly shift to thinking about the bags under my eyes accentuated by these office fluorescent lights- can we do something about this? And then I move on to, ‘Why am I wearing pants right now anyway?’ A friend warned from personal experience, if you don’t wear pants, make sure a mirror is not behind you – good tip. My early studies conclude it is not just me. The deadpan straight-ahead look is on almost everyone’s face. These studies are finding people are just trying to mask over the fact that they binged on “Ozark” Season 3 last night until 1 a.m. and they are just hoping to get through the call without having to participate. These early studies also suggest as the Pandemic Groundhog Days keep churning, blow-up dolls will soon take the place of people, just to see if anyone notices or, better yet, if anyone cares. A friend told me if you angle the camera just right, you can slide your phone under the camera, hit the mute button and complete your grocery list on Shipt all while appearing completely engaged. My studies have not confirmed this as fact. This seems like an advanced technique, more of a pro’s pro kind of move. So, if you see me driving down the road and I appear to be in a complete trance, just know it is not you nor it is personal, I am probably just on a Zoom hangover. Feel free to snap me out of it just don’t say anything about the bags under my eyes – I have already seen them in glaring light. On the bright side, the Bucs are rumored to sign Gronk. All is good in the world.