Zoom with a view
Online meetings and catch-ups were fun and companionable in 2020. This year? Not so much.
Zoom meetings and catch-ups were fun and companionable in 2020 and we joked about dressing like newsreaders, with smart tops above the desk or table and pyjama pants beneath.
They were an excuse to scrub up and “create” a background, maybe even with pull-down screens of fabulous places, as favoured by Stephen Mangan in the hilarious ABC sitcom Bliss. He’s a bigamist travel writer named Andrew whose only trips are between the homes of his two families in Bristol.
He checks in with each wife from his “hotel room” with various backgrounds and street noises, but really he’s in a locked office at his “other” house. Are you with me?
He goes nowhere but writes anonymous bestselling books purely from online research. Hang on, there’s an idea, and recently I did see a heap of Lonely Planet guides placed in the fantasy fiction section of a bookstore.
As an eager-to-please Zoom novice last year, I dressed my home office bookshelves with worthy show-off tomes so my “audience” would regard me as terribly clever. Such a practice is known as “Zoom library curation”, don’t you know?
The masters of the art line up books they have written, spines clearly showing, and perhaps with a trophy or two breaking up the rows.
Clearly, this is advanced Zoom practice and designed to intimidate. In the early days, I went all out with makeup and, heck, even matched earrings, bouncy hair (hot rollers removed) and virtuous white collars. This turned out to be unnecessary as I rarely worked out the camera palaver so would show up on a black screen as a tiny grey avatar.
Even liberal spritzes of my favourite neroli perfume and ability to clench my saggy chin for a whole hour failed to impress anyone.
But this year I can’t work out how to turn off the camera. I attend virtual meetings with a white stripe in my hair parting and I look like a badger. I have new glasses with wide frames and it’s impossible to tell if I am wearing mascara or even have retained my eyelashes.
My home office background is untidy and wild. The gangs of cockatoos in the gums by my window are so deafening that I raise my voice, scaring the pyjama pants off my “cohort” of companions.
One day I was distracted and answered the desk phone via loudspeaker to our local snake “specialist” who was checking on our injured diamond python, Lou. An industry colleague frowned and asked where I was, exactly. Oh how I longed for a pull-down screen of the Amazon jungle and a full camouflage kit.
