[Checks meeting agenda...] Where does it say ‘Talk cr*p and waste everyone's time?
- Reference: 1605266709
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/13/checks_meeting_agenda_where_does/
- Source link:
My apologies to those who may be jolted by my sudden shock tactics. As a regular reader, you understand how out of character it is for me to draw attention to myself. Normally I would shy away from such a thing as revealing all and laying it on the table. But now is the time to drop the drapes and stand proud before you.
WEBCAM: ON.
What’s that, you say? A disappointment? Sorry, this has not happened to me before. Can we try again later?
Well, I dunno, what did you expect? All I promised was that I’d enable my webcam. It’s not as if I was going to be stark bollock naked or something. Ha ha… oh I see, we might have been at cross-purposes: you thought I was threatening to Telegraph-Todge, WhatsApp-Wang or, er, Slack-the-Schlong?* Oh, you guys! Me, Messenger-my-Manhood? Skype-a-Pipe? Threema-the-Weiner? That’s definitely not my jam.
Much of my working day is occupied with online calls. Except we don’t call them calls any more: we call them "meetings", even if it’s a three-minute chat with your mater on Sundays to make sure she’s still alive and hasn’t rewritten her will in favour of the cat.
There was a time when I would spend a typical day on the blower, then writing up articles from the notes I took. Hey, there was a time when I spent most of my working days yelling threats of violence at laser drum scanners and rocking back and forth muttering “Come on, come on” next to a Linotron while a motorbike courier at the door would try to catch my eye so he could theatrically look at his watch again, but that’s another story.
Now it’s all online "meetings". And I was taken by surprise this week when a colleague asked this question in a private forum for tech media types: Do you join a meeting with your webcam switched on or off?
Off, obviously. Or so I thought. I subsequently learnt from the discussion thread that plenty of journos and PR types launch themselves head-first into the collaborative online abyss with camera enabled. If this is a common thing, it helps explain why I see so many disheveled people in group meetings (AKA "meetings" as opposed to "online calls").
If indeed it is a common thing, it makes you wonder if they habitually expose themselves in everyday life as well. Do they throw open the bedroom curtains at the front of the house while still naked? Do they answer the postman at the door while wearing a string vest and, er, a string? Do they stumble into the supermarket still wearing that bunny onesie and absurdly blurt out: “Oh, sorry for my appearance! I had no idea!”
If other people really want to look at me during a phone call, or a proper meeting for that matter, I’d rather have a robot Dabbsy in my place. Robot Dabbsy will nod, and look at the camera and blink and yawn and roll its eyes at every dopey thing he hears – just like the real thing, in fact!
[1]Youtube Video
Surely the humans who choose "webcam-on" at the beginning of their meetings have not seen the movie Snowden otherwise they’d know they don’t have to bother. I take the assumption that my webcam is always switched on; the little LED just lights up during video calls to make me happy, otherwise it’s probably looking at me all the time. That is, it would be if I hadn’t unplugged it.
[2]
For me, entering an online meeting with my webcam enabled is more than an On/Off choice: it involves crawling on the floor (where I keep my laptop, clamshell closed, of course) and plugging in the external webcam that’s perched on top of one of my displays and held in place with Blu-tak. It’s not something I can do accidentally.
As for the built-in cam on my laptop? I’ve taped over it, and not just for reasons of paranoia. I found that if the clamshell is open, regardless of what other displays and devices are attached, all video conferencing apps try to use my built-in webcam as the default, without asking. And since the laptop usually sits on the floor at my feet, conference participants would get a 10-second live stream of my crotch before I could scramble to the video mute button.
Nad Watch Live! Bill Oddie should present it.
As for "meetings" via smartphone, I never enable the video. Sometimes my caller enables his or hers, which prompts the app to ask me if I want to do the same. Obviously I can’t see this as I’m holding it to my ear, and unfortunately my ear is as capacitive as any other appendage. My inquisitive caller gets to see a macro view of my outer ear canal. Well, it’s their life choice, I suppose.
Anyway, I’m in a meeting right now, hidden as usual behind a stern-looking photo not unlike the one at the bottom of this page. But I can hold back no longer. As I announced at the top of this page, I must expose myself!
It’s a meeting of prerelease beta testers for an unnamed piece of software. That is, it has a name – it’s not just empty space under the app icon – but I signed an NDA and they’d send the dogs round if I uttered its name without consulting a rabbi first.
The meeting has an agenda. The dev team in India introduce themselves, then they demonstrate the new features, then they answer questions on what we’ve seen. Then it ends.
We’re at question time and one of my testing colleagues has taken the invitation to ask questions a little too literally. He is asking questions about anything that pops into his head, none of which have anything to do with the software demo we’ve just watched.
He had a favourite feature that nobody else used and was removed six years ago – can they put it back please?
Will there be a version of the program one day for right-to-left, down-to-up, diagonal and inside-out languages?
There’s a word in a dialog window nested 14 levels deep into the Preferences – completely unrelated to the feature demo, of course – that he doesn’t like. Actually, it’s not the word but the font he doesn’t like. Or the colour. Or the kerning. Or something.
And so he carries on. This meeting should have finished half an hour ago and we’re stuck listening to this bollocks. Undeterred by the audible sighs and harrumphing we can all hear from fellow meeting participants, he starts typing into the chat window: Come on, everyone, ask some questions! It shouldn’t be just me!
Except it is just you. On and on. I was about to type back in the chat window something along the lines of Agendas exist for a reason you boring blowhard but decide to expose myself instead and stare him down by looking directly into the camera and grinning weirdly like that prison footage of Charlie M.
I click on the red camcorder button and begin staring.
Within a few seconds, other participants are switching on their webcams. Some are miming yawns with dramatic hand gestures to their mouths; others stretching like cats; several are almost certainly playing games on their smartphones; one has put his feet up on the desk in front of the webcam so we can't see him, only between socks.
Blabbermouth doesn’t get the hint and carries on. Only when the otherwise irreproachably polite Indian team leader cracks – having answered the same question four times, using the same words – and announces the abrupt and immediate end of the meeting, does BM stop talking. And even that was only because we all got booted out at the same time. Perhaps he’s still talking right now…
Good on you, San. That’s my jam.
[3]Youtube Video
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. He has found another advantage of disabling the webcam during a meeting: it means you can stop listening to the time-wasting stream-of-arseishness from fellow participants and attend another meeting before the first one has finished, using another device. He says this will get easier once Disney finishes his robot. More at [4]Autosave is for Wimps and [5]@alidabbs .
* I have since been informed the correct expression is ‘dick-pic’.
Get our [6]Tech Resources
[1] https://youtu.be/D8_VmWWRJgE
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/11/13/shutterstock_boring_meeting.jpg
[3] https://youtu.be/9GkkR6-er4c
[4] https://autosaveisforwimps.substack.com
[5] https://twitter.com/alidabbs
[6] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
I thank the noodly appendages of TFSM that I have no need to attend such meetings.
It's bad enough having bores like that in in person meetings but at least then you have a chance to knock your coffee over them.
Coffee
What a waste of coffee. You should knock their coffee over them.
"You're on mute mate"
Possibly the most used phrase this year, or at least a close second to "No mask, no entry". My favourite would be, "Could you switch off your video please? It's just that we can see your dogs having sex in the background."
Re: "You're on mute mate"
I like the "mute others" feature in Teams. If they babble on too long, I just mute them and carry on with the meeting.
One of the guys I work with has an excellent bluetooth headset, the kinds of which are denied to us mortals using Linux*. He always has the cam on, and will often just wander off to do other things around the house (no, not that), make a drink in the kitchen, answer the door etc. It's a little disconcerting, he looks like he's not there anymore, just an empty desk, and then a right on the point question as he simultaneously makes a smoothie.
* I'm pretty sure its got some proprietary codec that allows high quality audio + microphone at the same time, a codec that is just available for Mac and probably Windows. Me, even with my fancy Sennheiser cans I'm stuck with A2DP, which gives great audio but no microphone, or HSP, decent microphone but the audio sounds like I'm in 2002.
BT headsets
You've just caused me to go and have a look for one to buy - I have a wired one for work but I like the freedom of wandering around and we never use webcams for our work "meetings" - so thanks, sort of...
Re: BT headsets
We have Jabra DECT headsets on our PCs. The range is much better and more reliable than BT.
Tom 38> He always has the cam on, and will often just wander off to do other things around the house
Because he forgot to "log off" earlier?
I just mute my mic, make sure there's no reflection visible, and then go browsing websites. Video-conferencing is the least information-dense way of communicating ever, short of an in-person meeting with five people who have no idea why they're even there.
During the first lockdown, nothing of value was ever done in the video meetings and they were there purely to "see people face-to-face". I used to STOP WORK in order to have them. And then someone would have to email round the meetings and/or meeting recording anyway, so I didn't even have to make notes when my name was mentioned.
As I've claimed for years, and have managed to prove definitively this year, many people work better from home because you don't have that kind of nonsense, and everyone's recording what they're saying so there's no backtracking, lying or ambiguity. You just ask them live "You know I said that would do X, you want me to still do that anyway?" and they can't wriggle out of giving you either an answer, or a time by which you can have that answer.
I got more done, in less time, with less objections and hassle, and less stress when working from home than ANY OTHER TIME I've ever been working. And that was literally the period of the most upheaval, turmoil, rapid-training of staff, unusual situations, new software, different systems, etc. ever.
But though I have Bluetooth headsets, if I was using them I would mainly turn on their secondary feature - they can play music from an internal card at the same time as they do Bluetooth audio from the computer.
Hmm - would love to know which BT headset that is, it might be compatible with Teams, which (apparantly) has yet to acknowledge the existence of bluetooth headsets with microphones.
(why the **** MS saw fit to give Teams it's own sound settings, and make them (apparantly) incompatible with the Win10 OS, I have no idea).
Don't get me started. I have a very nice Jabra folding headset that gets a firmware update about 3 times a month to try and keep it's hardware buttons working along with the rate of change of Teams. Right now I can join a meeting with the hardware button, but not leave it. Periodically the mute button doesn't work with Teams and I end up in "double mute" having to unmute both Teams and the headset to talk.
I had a cheap Anker BT headset connected to my PC. Worked fine with Teams.
It's not really a bluetooth headset, but...
I've got a pair of Sennheiser noise-cancelling headphones with a built-in microphone and bluetooth connection. I've successfully used them on Teams calls (on the Linux version of Teams), so some things work. I didn't try using the mute button on the headphones though.
Re: It's not really a bluetooth headset, but...
I've had similar success with a cheap pair of MPOW BT noise-cancelling headphones. They're fine for calls, where there's a certain amount of lag anyway, and listening to podcasts, but far too laggy for gaming / watching movies. Because they're noise-cancelling they have a mic in them for the NC feed, which is surprisingly okay for using as a headset.
The first time I saw this in action was standing at the urinals in the Ziff-Davis toilets next to Guy Kewney and he began talking to me in an uncomfortably friendly way, a little loudly I thought. I only realised he was wearing a (pre-Bluetooth) cordless headset when he zipped up, walked to the basin to wash his hands, dried them and walked out while still talking.
That does raise uncomfortable questions about the motivation for wanting "hands-free" kit, but it does lead neatly back to the opening words of the article.
I got myself a very nice bluetooth headset which includes a cable for those times when the meeting lasts longer than the battery. Unfortunately what I didn't realise was that the cable only includes connections for the headphones and not for the microphone. Now when the battery runs down I have to sign out of the meeting, what a shame...and amazing how often that 'last gasp' of the battery comes in when people won't take 'shut the **** up' as a hint to stop talking
I splashed out and bought a wireless gaming headset (non-bluetooth), because (A) I wanted something more comfortable than the budget call-centre plastic tat one-ear wired headset supplied by my work, and (B) although you might not notice it in a call, BT has a noticeable delay which can be several hundred milliseconds. Enough to really screw with your head if you actually using it for gaming.
It uses some proprietary wireless dongle which does require plugging into a spare USB socket, which given the preponderance of things to plug into USB these days (mouse, keyboard, phone charger, etc. etc.) may exhaust the measly number of sockets on some laptops. However, with the amount of time everyone seems to be spending in skype/teams/zoom/whatever "meetings" it's a godsend to have something that doesn't make your ears sore and has decent sound quality.
It plays nicely with Teams as well, and apparently works under Linux.
As with such things, it wasn't cheap, and some might balk at spending [1]£100 on a headset . You could probably claim the tax back on one if you could claim it was for work though...
edit - it comes with a 1.5m charging cable (micor-USB) as well so you can plug it in to charge and still move around for those really long meetings.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Corsair-Wireless-Customisable-Aluminium-Compatibility/dp/B07Y2MJRW6/ref=sr_1_3
I'll have to check this...
Was pretty sure my Sony cans worked on Linux OK. They certainly work just fine with windows/MacOS/Android.
Only thing really lacking is a mute button the headset itself. Now that would be a boon.
denied to us mortals using Linux
There is a doughty chap writing support for them into Pulseaudio right now. The poor bloke has had to stare down some right wankers. It is a bit involved but he is gradually getting it sorted out. Also I think some needed kernel changes have or are about to be merged.
For a flavour of what is going on:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/merge_requests/288
Nad Watch Live!
Better viewing than Ring Watch Live?
Re: Nad Watch Live!
I rather think that depends on whether the Nads are also going to catch fire...
Re: Nad Watch Live!
I've now actually looked up "ring watch live" and I'm very relieved it wasn't what I had feared, even after the catch fire comment didn't sufficiently enlighten me. (I don't know what y'all do after a vindaloo supper in times of lockdown.)
Do not disturb
The yang to the yin of meetings is the do not disturb status. In Lync and S4B it stopped people talking to you. As far as I can tell in Teams, it's just yet another status colour and doesn't actually do anything, so you can still get sucked into meetings anyway and have people suddenly jabber inane questions at you with no preparation because you're somehow regarded as the domain expert (i.e. you might have looked at it once). Yeah, thanks for badgering me on Teams, I was in danger of getting something properly finished.
Re: Do not disturb
On our work systems we have Skype for business (old set-up for internal IM's and calls), Teams (for customer support, although we can only join their meetings, we can't host external ones) and Webex (for customer support which we can host for externals).
The problem is everyone is so used to Skype and checking that, that we keep getting interruptions of people IM'ing and calling on Skype when we're in Webex or Teams calls as they of course don't change the "available" status on Skype.
I'm now getting to the stage of permanently settings Skype to "do not disturb" just to get anything done with the other two and actual customers...
Missed one...
"I have since been informed the correct expression is ‘dick-pic’."
That's a shame - You missed out "Zoomed your Zucchini".
...Although this being el Reg, perhaps you omitted it for security and privacy reasons.
Skindred
Dabbsy gets extra points this week for the Skindred video. Newport's finest!
What's a Linotron though grandad? And tell us about the punched cards again! ;)
Re: Skindred
I worked long ago with three generations of Linotron laser typesetters, but remember only the 202 and the 300. The ones I was acquainted with used photo paper, so a courier would have had to wait for the paper to be run through the developer. I guess the 300 might've output directly to paper, but it seems like a mighty expensive device to have used as a laser printer.
Clapper!
All of our new laptops have a physical clapper in front of the camera.
But a majority of our users are still on PCs and only have headsets - webcams were in short supply and most didn't want them anyway.
Re: Clapper!
I keep telling our lot to get headsets (those who aren't using a hand held phone with earbuds), and the response is "the shops are all out of them". Funny, I upgraded mine online and got it delivered by a Bezos Bozo in a day or so. I don't think people really care.
Re: Clapper!
In March/April, we had to wait about 2 weeks for headsets (from Amazon, everywhere else was sold out).
At the moment, the prices are rising again and availability is limited.
Notebooks from our preferred supplier aren't deliverable, again. We have to wait a couple of weeks.
Joys of a slow broadband
I get the pleasure of asking everyone to turn off their video because it blocks me from the meeting and, seeing as they are waiting on me to complete development, they don't have much choice.
I have been in one meeting where some dimwit wouldn't turn his off and I kept saying, "Sorry, I cannot hear you, it is either see you or hear you, which would you prefer?" ...
Don't need to use a f***ing computer
As long as there's been meetings there's been monomaniac idiots who ask questions when everyone else just wants to get the Hell out of there and get lunch/go home/do some proper work.
Even the letters AOB on an agenda send shivers down my spine. Because they'll have some.
And if you have a crap chair running the meeting the AOB/questions/plenary can last longer the the actual meeting.
It's Friday and I now need a lie down.
Icon. For me. I deserve this now.
Old age
I did once accidently enable the cam after rushing out of the shower to take a skype call. Realised and turned it off almost immediately. The other person remarked later that it had been too quick to properly see what I was wearing, but whatever it was, it definitely needed ironing.
That guy
You've all seen him. He walks into a meeting with That Look on his face. He might be a bit overweight, and have a mustache. But one thing is certain: it's all about Him.
Usually it's a guy on the make. He'll write furiously when the presenter speaks, interrupt everybody else, and fire questions about why his project/team/company isn't getting a fair shake. He might say or do something that would get an ordinary mortal in hot water, but the brass don't know what to do with him so he gets away with it.
If and when it's all over you either feel inspired or scared. Some start checking the job listings. Others just shuffle back to their work and hope the fallout doesn't land on them.
That's what the webcam is for.
I switch it on and stand up when the meeting time ended 10 minutes ago and someone is repeating the to-do's for the fourth time. It's a great visual way to wrap up.