During the conversation, I felt myself mentally latching onto those curtains, which, as we spoke of the economic crisis and how it might affect my husband’s and my retirement plan, seemed to throw the formal discussion we were having into a more leisurely context. It happened to be a beautiful day, and the window behind him was open, and framed by soft, cream-colored curtains that appeared to sway slightly in the breeze. Working from home, he was dressed in a lightweight button-down shirt. On the occasions we’d seen him in the past, he had been fully suited, sitting in his spare, corporate office in a lower-Manhattan high-rise, where an assistant offered us coffee and half-sized bottles of mineral water. On my first-ever video call on the platform-could it have been only in mid-March?-my husband and I spoke to our financial adviser. I’ve found that even the most subtle shifts that Zoom brings about have the power to jar and fascinate. As long as we’re living in a trying time, why pretend otherwise? At a moment when the stakes of real-life unpredictability are deadly serious, Zoom is a space in which to safely welcome unpredictability and looser boundaries. And, although I might be more interested than most in seeing colleagues in bathrobes and cats on keyboards, or hearing a co-worker’s surprisingly noisy peeing, I also suspect that embracing rather than rejecting this chaos would be a gain even for those less prying than me. Surely the haste with which we have had to adjust to the new reality-and the insistence with which the human element tends to insert itself into the supposedly seamless world of technology-makes it inevitable that Zoom, like life itself, will be chaotic. Turn off the audio, because sound is louder than you think.”Īs I encountered these well-meaning suggestions, I felt a resistance rising within me. On NPR’s “ All Things Considered,” the USA Today columnist Steven Petrow said, bluntly, “If you need to go to the bathroom . . . Drinking coffee or tea during a meeting is fine, but, she warned, “avoid slurping” she, too, vetoed bathrobes. In an article in the Times, Brian X. Chen provided Zoom-specific etiquette tips: “Our families are more important than anyone, but that doesn’t mean our colleagues want to see our partners in their bathrobes, our cats sitting on keyboards or our children throwing toys.” On the Cut, Lizzie Post, Emily Post’s great-great-granddaughter, weighed in on inappropriate Zoom behavior. Read The New Yorker’s complete news coverage and analysis of the coronavirus pandemic.īeing confined to our homes, often with roommates or family members or pets, and having no clear separation between work and leisure, has given rise to a culture whose weirdness Zoom has made particularly legible. “I have two friends I watch a movie with, and now I have to push that to another day because of a surprise birthday party,” a friend told me. Other evenings, one navigated conflicting Zoom plans. Some nights, after spying screenshots posted on social media of acquaintances raising glasses during a virtual cocktail party, one might experience Zoom FOMO. classes, at cardio-kickboxing training and on kindergarten playdates. Suddenly, we couldn’t see anyone in person, but everyone appeared to be seeing one another on Zoom-at college lectures and in elementary-school P.E. With millions of Americans self-quarantining for the foreseeable future, Zoom became, seemingly overnight, not only a professional lifeline but also a way of life. The video quickly went viral, but I had forgotten about it until recently, when the videoconferencing service Zoom, and the circumstances under which I and many others had begun to use it, reminded me of Kelly’s thin smile and his wife’s desperately grappling arms.Īs the coronavirus pandemic made its rapid and implacable advance across the United States, forcing sweeping closures of schools and workplaces and bringing about the disappearance of any type of collective, real-world activity, it became obvious that a new era had begun. The pair-a jauntily assertive, glasses-wearing preschooler and a baby who skittered in, as if propelled by a mysterious force, on a wheeled walker-were pursued and eventually apprehended by their frantic mother, who, on her hands and knees, hustled the saboteurs out and pulled the office door shut. Three years ago, the political analyst and South Korea expert Robert Kelly was giving a live interview on the BBC, via videoconference, from his home office in Busan, when his two young children barged into the room.
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