Prior to 2020, video conferencing was still novel. It felt cool and high-tech, a little Star-Trekky, despite how clumsy Skype was back then.
But that was the Before Times. Once the Plague Years hit and Zoom zoomed into our working lives, in-person meetings evaporated like the smoke you could no longer smell on your coworker’s clothes, because you were never again in the same room with them.
There were other advantages, besides avoiding exposure to a possibly deadly virus.
Instead of having to get on an airplane to travel to corporate headquarters for the Big Thing, or even having to drag yourself to the conference room down the hall for the weekly staff update, you could remain comfortably at your desk and on your rump while the little faces imprisoned in rectangles accumulated on your screen.
You could attend a meeting from anywhere! From home, from your car, even from the back room of Fred’s Tavern, if nobody out front was blasting the music or playing billiards.
And it wasn’t just work meetings. Nearly any kind of class or consultation that had once required your bodily attendance — marriage counseling, yoga classes, court hearings — could be done via live video.
It was kind of amazing for a while. A very short while.
Quicker minds than mine have commented on the foibles of video conferencing, which are legion.
People’s kids and pets rapidly wearing out their cuteness. Learning much more than you ever wanted to know about the domestic surroundings and hygiene habits of your colleagues. Staring up fellow Zoomers’ noses because they have their cameras positioned below them, or pretending not to notice that they’re still in their pajama bottoms (at least they’re wearing pants).
Some people avoid disclosing their real-life surroundings by employing a fake background, in which case you’re confronted with a talking head whose movements cause the person’s outlines to blur jarringly into a tropical island or outer space.
Then there are the folks who can’t figure out their mute buttons and who blather silently on and on while everyone else implores them in the chat to unmute.
Which is less annoying than people who don’t remember to silence themselves while they’re having a spat with their WFH spouse, or who are carrying on what they think is a clandestine phone convo with a corporate headhunter.
By now, those are tropes. We’re resigned to them, just as we once had to accept the screeching of Ethernet connections.
But there is another unpleasant feature of online meetings — one that is insidiously advancing like slow, corrosive rust. I can’t find any stats or studies on the phenomenon (and I searched the Internets for over ten minutes), but I’ll bet the ranch you’ve noticed the same thing happening.
I don’t have a ranch, by the way.
What I’m referring to is the interval between the scheduled start time of any such meeting and when it effectively gets underway.
You know what I’m talking about: the squares that gradually pop into existence on your screen, some filled with avatars, some with the attendee’s name, a few with preoccupied-looking faces who are looking anywhere but at the camera.
The meeting host who welcomes everyone at around four minutes past the hour and then inevitably says, “So we’re waiting for a few more folks to arrive . . .”
You may as well go get another cup of coffee. Make some avocado toast while you’re at it.
This is more pronounced for paid webinars and classes than it is for work calls, but it happens in both cases. It costs everybody, either in time or money, or both.
Thanks to the human talent for adaptation, it’s getting worse.
If everybody knows that video calls, at least those involving more than two people, never start when they’re supposed to, then why should anyone show up on time? Don’t we all have better things to do that we can’t demonstrate by doing something else important-looking while we’re standing by on screen?
As this phenomenon degenerates into an unspoken custom, the gap gets wider. Last year, four minutes of waiting around, this year six. Next year, ten.
I looked it up: the average employee attends between 10 and 20 online meetings per week. If said employee has to simmer for ten minutes, or even five, waiting for anything useful to happen, that amounts to a good 16 hours a week, or around 800 hours in a full-time year.
Sure, it’s great that we don’t have to drive or fly or schlepp to every meeting, but there’s something particularly soul-deadening about farting around waiting for the third online whatever of the day to become worthwhile.
That time we’re wasting isn’t free, after all. Surely we can do better.
I know! Since it’s currently the solution for every problem, how about we institute a Time Tariff?
Let’s get to work on that. Just schedule the Zoom and put the link on my shared calendar.
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