Day 24: Zooming into Zoom
Sorry I'm late
Hello to my fans. Because no one asked for it (actually, two of you did! Thanks), here’s yesterday’s letter from quarantine.
Since Zoom is the place to be these days, both for work and for socialising (everyone’s basically pooping where they’re eating), or just to get confirmation from another human being that you actually still exist, I started wondering about Zoom protocol and whether we should treat it as just another space that exists outside our house, which means we should dress for each purpose it serves. How would you dress up for work? How would you dress up for a quiz night with friends? Maybe this is my chance for someone to finally ask me: “Who are you wearing?”
Work preparation for Zoom probably involves some kind of half-news broadcaster, half-pervert look. You look great from the waist up, but who knows what’s happening down there. For the ladies, make up remains in the grey area, mostly because it adds a considerable amount of effort to every morning and evening beauty routine, but also because, let’s face it, if we’re letting our colleagues see the inside of our houses, how good our face looks stops having any kind of impact. Getting dressed up for Zoom is one thing, but putting make up on? Honey, if you don’t like me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best.
The number of viral videos that show people going to the bathroom in the middle of a videoconference and forgetting their cameras on is revealing (yes, pun intended). To me, it can only mean two things:
1) Meetings should be shorter: at the moment it looks like meeting lengths are bigger than people’s bladders
2) Meetings are useful: surprisingly, people really are paying attention, though unfortunately, not all of them.
When using Zoom with friends, the rules of the game change. You start resembling some Charlize Theron character that has practically given up on life and spends her days in tracksuits, the only difference being that Charlize Theron manages to look good even when she looks bad.
While using Zoom with friends last night, I also discovered that my microphone input had been set on a really low setting for the past three weeks, which means that in most meetings when people were nodding and listening, they were just looking at their image on their screens and I was just talking to myself.
The light at the end of the tunnel is appearing. The lockdown might be lifted on April 13th. Although someone mentioned this yesterday, which was April Fools’, so I don’t know what to believe anymore.
Disclaimer: You’ll probably receive another one of these tonight. A real artist stays true to her mission, and mine is to bring you joy every day by highlighting the absurdity of the situation we are in. Feel free to read it whenever you want. Feel free to print it all and use it as toilet paper. Like life in quarantine itself, letters from quarantine doesn’t come with a manual. You just have to hold on to it, and enjoy it whenever you can.
Lunch: White beans in tomato juice, with artichokes and feat. The artichokes were raw. If you’ve never eaten raw artichokes, it’s like eating someone’s fingernails in an XXL format. The rest of it tasted nice though.
Song of the day: Dire Straits - Walk of Life