Zoom, webinars and anti-emetics

Photo by Marcus Aurelius on Pexels

What fresh kind of hell is this? Cue a deluge of complaints about video call fatigue. Yes, video call fatigue. You know it's a thing. That washed-out feeling when you have taken one too many Skype calls, and it's beginning to dawn on you that you've lost a part of your soul in that vacuum between your screen and theirs. It's that awkward gut-feeling that while you've been struggling with your inadequate, bandwidth challenged wi-fi hub that's perched precariously next to your three-year old laptop in your makeshift home office, your strength has been steadily draining, and you may actually be losing the will to live. Or at least, the will to waddle over to your fridge for the umpteenth time today to scoop another spoonful out of that tub of Ben and Jerry's (other brands are available, but they're probably not worth a mention).

Go on, admit it. You thought working from home would be a doddle, didn't you? The morning commute is as quick and easy as you thought it might be as long as you can avoid tripping on the discarded sock on the third stair from the top, but the trade off isn't that great once you open your laptop. WFH isn't quite the same as you thought it would be. It's more WTF than FTW.

As every day of lockdown passes, you crave more for that human contact. You try to get your fix each and every day, not just during working hours when you need to talk to your colleagues. You love video calls - and you hate video calls. It's doubly true in the evenings when you call Granny so she can do her FaceTime thing with the family she hasn't seen for seven weeks, four hours and a long weekend. When she eventually gets her camera to work all you and the kids get to see is a blurry close up of her knitted cardigan and the image is jumping all over the place, yet you still have to listen politely as she complains about her lumbago.

Video calls are inescapable now. Throughout your day the meetings beckon, students demand tutorials, webinar and conference invitations bombard your in-box. It's obligatory. It is a gradual erosion of your fortitude. It's a lock-down certainty that shortly after you sit down on that rickety old chair in your home office, you'll need to click a certain little icon. Well, here's some advice. You should never mention Zoom. Too much controversy. Avoid it like that discarded sock on the stairs. And Microsoft Teams? Don't even go there. It's enough to make a bishop kick a hole in a stain glass window (if bishops could get into their churches and cathedrals to do the kicking, which they can't because right now they're under exactly the same frustrating lock-down restrictions as us non-cassock wearers).

Do we deserve this purgatory?.... perhaps. We demand our social exchanges. We simply must connect. We will endure the medieval torture chamber to make sure we get our conversation. If you can actually fire up a video call, and it doesn't force your laptop to crash and float off to that blue screen Valhalla where all technology goes when it finally gives up the ghost (in the machine)....  and if you can get a picture and sound that's usable, and there's no pixellation or latency .... and if the 'other side' has actually remembered to turn up..... and if they know how to get their video working..... it's then - you realise - that you are doomed to sit through yet another hour of meetings/webinar presentations. But you know it gets worse.

Chaotic evil is to be found in the behaviour of those 'on the other side'. You know them... those who don't mute their audio while they shout profanities at the cat. Those who don't know how to un-mute when they speak (and that includes some journalists). Those who all speak at once, and then stop simultaneously. And then start again in unison. and then stop again. Multiple times. The buggers who won't stop tinkering with their cameras, 'touching up' their self images, vainly repositioning their laptops every few seconds to achieve the best picture of themselves, constantly moving their laptop and causing inertia sickness for the rest of the group. Repeat, ad nauseam.

You think that's bad? Some will insist on projecting CG backgrounds to create 'an ambience' of professionalism. Their bookcase and lamp standard isn't enough. They don't want the rest of the world to see their untidy little homes. So they resort to CGI. Low video processing speeds cause a constantly shimmering dark halo to appear behind the perpetrator's head, lending them the disturbing appearance of a evil god of from the darkest recesses of Wes Craven's diseased imagination. It's more distracting than a seagull pinching your chips and just as vomit inducing as a back-seat ride on the biggest roller-coaster at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Worse still is when the 'other side' begins to tap heavily on their keyboard, typing while you're talking, causing their image to vibrate up and down like they're on a sprung dance floor.

Well, it looks as though for the foreseeable future we're all stuck with video call fatigue, shaky images and pixellation. So, pass me the anti-emetics, and keep that sick bucket on standby. Oh, for the days of meetings where people got bored but at least the room wasn't moving about. I'll tell you this for nowt. If I don't get off this video merry-go-round soon I think there's going to be a massive technicolour yawn.

WFH, WTF? FTW? SMH TBH. Seriously. See you on the other side.

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NB: I was goaded to write this post by none other than that Stella Collins. It was an innocent question, but look where's it's ended....

Zoom, webinars and anti-emetics by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's