I Love You All, But Please Don’t Make Me Zoom With You
Forced separation is making everyone giddy to watch each other eat pancakes over webcam. I’m out.
With apologies to the company that has recently become synonymous with group videoconferencing in quarantine: If I never see another Zoom meeting link in my email, it will be #toosoon.
From board meetings to book clubs, lunch hours to choir practice, it would appear that forced separation has made all y’all positively giddy for virtual togetherness. Everywhere I turn, people want to watch each other eat pancakes and do karaoke and reenact the Battle of Winterfell over webcam. But if I’ve learned anything from my stint in self-isolation so far, it’s that group video chatting — even with beloved friends and family — doesn’t alleviate my anxiety. It gives me more.
In real-life gatherings, I tend to set my laser beams on a single human with whom I can have a substantive conversation before I get up, pee, and return to a different perch to engage in quality repartee with a single someone else. That’s not possible in a group Zoom, and it seriously throws me off my game. (Well, that and the 15-minute purgatory while someone adjusts their microphone and shushes their children and handles their iPad like it’s a rabid coyote with a GoPro melded to its snout.)
Right off the bat, my comfort level is inversely proportionate to the number of people on the screen. Then tech trouble and cross-talk inevitably lead to communication breakdowns — and as someone with an especially low tolerance for awkward silence, it’s painful. My witty asides do not land on a delay, and when I can’t keep the conversation rolling merrily along, I feel like I’ve failed everyone.
And then I get twitchy. Trust me, nobody wants to see that.
But what about Zooming for work, you ask? Surely it’s a necessary lifeline for businesses during these unprecedented times!
Indeed, bosses everywhere have been attempting to mimic normalcy by summoning their employees to virtual videoconferences the same way they used to schedule meetings and conference calls: far too often, and unnecessarily. Per usual, 90% of this shit could be handled in an email. And while one could…
