I don't know about you, but I'm really starting to despise Zoom.
It's not just that particular app or platform, either; the very form of the group video call - often under the guise of a "virtual meeting" - is starting to grate on me. Zoom, Teams, Houseparty, Facetime, whatever; it's all more trouble than it's worth.
LinkedIn has been covering the concept of "video chat fatigue" for some weeks now, but I'm not really sure the word "fatigue" does it justice. I don't find Zoom calls tiring or annoying as opposed to downright insufferable.
Work calls are the best of the bunch, I suppose. Although that's a similar claim to being the least painful bee sting sustained during a fistfight with an apiary, or the most stable seating option in a room full of manufacturer-rejected rocking chairs.
Even then, I find most of the things that somebody "needed to talk through" could have been handled with half the people in the "room", and definitely don't require us to see each other's faces.
Yes, I know social interaction in the workplace is important, and yes, I know there are ways to mitigate and navigate the irksome uncanny-valley issues some people have with a video call, but I still just don't understand why it's necessary.
Why? Why do you need to see me? Why is it important? There's nothing all that entertaining about a head-and-shoulders profile of me on any given Thursday in my bedroom-cum-office. If anything, I should just take my LinkedIn profile picture and copy-paste that as a still virtual avatar for whenever I talk. That way, at least it'll look professional, and not like I'm pretending that I'm not wearing a suit jacket with a pair of oversized tracksuit bottoms.
If you think about it, there's probably an argument for making meetings more lean in any normal situation. Unless somebody categorically needs to be in the room and contribute something to the discussion, shouldn't they just be focusing on other projects anyway? This obsession with driving efficiencies and being agile was dominating office discourse in the time before lockdown; so why have we now decided to add video calls to the mix? They're hardly notorious for their ease of use and overall efficiency.
Firstly, somebody's always late. I don't know why, but it's fundamentally more acceptable to be late for a fake meeting than a real one. Secondly, the host has to repeat every third sentence because he lives in some rudimentary Neolithic settlement 100 miles from any major city where internet access is closer to local folklore than a basic human right. And finally, the meeting ID system - I will admit, this is unique to Zoom - seems to be closer in functionality to a seance than any kind of fixed numerical assignment system.
But like I said, work calls are the best of the bunch. It's the obsession with them outside of the virtual office that's really starting to annoy me.
A friend will appear on a group chat with something along the lines of "haha haven't seen you lot in a while, how about a Zoom catch-up on Sunday???" and it's unfortunate that I then have to delete the messaging app in question rather than explain why I don't want to do it.
If I can say anything with absolute certainty about lockdown, then it is this: pretending to do something you normally enjoy over video is not the same as actually doing it. To call it a shallow imitation would be quite a compliment. It's a bizarre, hollow insult, if anything.
And somehow, it feels like saying the words "I don't really want to do a Zoom call" translates as "I can't make time for you". To all my friends who have hosted the video chats that I've tirelessly dodged, I want to apologise, but I really can't. I just flat-out do not want to do it.
I just think we're now at the point that approaches total delusion. How many people on any given Friday night are sitting around holding an iPad and drinking a bottle of wine, screaming the words "VIRTUAL PUB" and pretending it's anything even remotely close to the real thing? It's tantamount to madness.
Look, if you're one of those people who actually enjoy Zoom Monopoly or Houseparty Scrabble, then don't let me disparage you; this line of argument comes from a place of jealousy, because I'm just totally unable to enjoy it. Laughing at the absurdity of it was fun for a week or two, but we're now three months into lockdown and I'm considering deleting every video chat app from all the devices I own in some kind of pseudo-Buddhist camera purge.
I recognise that traditional methods of communication had to adapt to help humanity cope with this pandemic. And companies like Zoom and Microsoft have really stepped up to the plate and delivered what people want. That's great - technical innovation in a time of crisis really does go to show just what human ingenuity can achieve.
But for all the people out there who host and schedule these chats, professional or otherwise, I'm just asking you to consider the people like me: the camera-shy misanthropes of the world. The people who would be perfectly happy to disable video and not have to watch half a dozen distorted head-and-shoulder profiles bob around the screen. Conference calls have satisfied the needs of an innumerable amount of remote professionals and their employers for almost four decades, and they certainly ain't broke.
Oh, and stop with the quizzes, too, while you're at it. They're just weird.
