By now we are all old hats at "Zoom Life" having lived it for most of a year.
In fact, it's got to the point where for many of us Zoom has become a necessary evil - necessary because it allows us to keep working, but evil because by now most of us hate it - and I've been one of those haters. When an old friend recently suggested in a "school friends" Whatsapp group that we have a reunion via Zoom I baulked. 'I want to see you all in person, not over Zoom!' I wailed.
But I understood where my friend was coming from. Since we couldn't arrange a time that worked for everyone, Zoom was the perfect solution. And I had to concede that Zoom has been beneficial in other ways too.
Before Zoom most of us went into work and acted like we didn't also have an often messy home life we were leaving behind. A life of pets, children, domestic chores, DIY gone bad, not to mention our partners and the people we shared our home with. By the time we got to work we had pulled ourselves together in a way to convince everyone: Look how put together I am. Nothing can faze me.
Cut to half way through 2020 and we had Zoom meetings interrupted by naked partners (yes I witnessed this).
Cut to half way through 2020 and we had Zoom meetings interrupted by naked partners (yes I witnessed this), wailing children who couldn't work out their homeschooling tasks, and needy pets.
During one of my Zoom meetings last year I decided to introduce my colleagues to my kids because they were probably going to see them often enough in the background. And also, so I didn't have to keep telling my children who I was speaking to.
And then recently my husband was in the midst of an important client-facing Zoom meeting when one of his colleagues had a pet melting down in the background. The dog wouldn't stop barking no matter what. Normally such sort of domestic interruptions would've been a cause of horror during client meetings, but in this instance everyone understood. Yes, sometimes our pets lose it, sometimes our children do, this is life and we all live it.
That has been the upside of Zoom life. We've all come to be a lot more understanding of the domestic situation our colleagues are living through. It's not just our colleagues. Doctors, professors, political experts - all who also happen to be parents - were doing live TV interviews over Zoom that were . And you know what? Rather than minding these interruptions the public loved them. It showed us that we all are human.
It's the humanising of the different, varied situations we are all living through that has in many ways made us more understanding of each other. Gone are the days we could pretend that we didn't have a life outside of work. Now you can plainly see that we all do.
We are all juggling a number of roles in less than ideal situations. So, yes, while Zoom and other video conferencing apps are less than ideal and I'd much rather see people in person than over a screen, they do have benefits. And for me one of the big benefits has been that not only can I be more open about the domestic situation I'm juggling, but that I realise I'm not alone. Everyone else is living as messy and complicated a life as I am. And that fills me with joy and relief.
