I hate Zoom. I hate WebEx. I hate Teams. I hate them all.
I hate it when people don’t turn their camera on. I hate it when people do turn their camera on.
I hate it when people forget to unmute themselves. I hate it when people forget to mute themselves. I hate it when people can’t figure out why there’s an echo, and I hate it when people sound like they’re in a well.
I hate it when I can’t look people in the eye. I hate it when people don’t look me in the eye. I hate it when I can tell from their eyes that people are multi-tasking, and I hate it when I multitask.
But most of all, most of all, I hate how tired it makes me. So very, very tired, at the end of every day, when I haven’t been able to talk to another living soul face to face. But instead of people’s living breathing — yes, breathing, because of course therein lies in the dangers — bodies, we get a bobble on the screen. We get evasions and miscommunications. We lose the context and gain the convenience. We make the transcript in the utterly, utterly vain hope that we can make meaning from these meetings.
God I hate it all.