When pandemic hits in 2020, and work from home and Zoom call becomes a way of life, talking while on mute or assuming you are on mute and talking is a normal thing to see. Before that, however, it was funny, people would make memes and jokes, etc., but after March 2020, when most people were working from home, Zoom funny moments, aka gaffes, weren’t that funny anymore.
This story happened when gaffes were a big deal to be honest. At the time our company was using WebEx – again Zoom wasn’t that popular either, but thanks to COVID, Zoom became a verb in English and even though sometimes people are not actually using Zoom, they refer to it as Zooming!!
I like doing reports and presenting them to my clients. It was the part of my job I truly enjoyed. Renewals were always weird, I was the one building reports, and recommendations which more often than not translated to upsell, and retention and yet it was Sales who would take home a big-fat-juicy check! Not fair at all if you asked me.
I was working on an Annual Business Review for this client who was a hard client and every year we had a hard time getting them to renew. In this account, my sales partner was very involved. We were trying to get some other folks on the renewal call, hoping they showed interest and found the program, but you know what they say: be careful what you wish for!
My sales partner was able to find other parties within the company and they were eager to join! Good news you would think. No! Not really. We ended up having about 30 people on the call!! Most of them had no clue what we did, and they were asking lots of questions. I had my report up, but we were mostly explaining to those who were new what we were doing and the benefits of our partnership.
Because we had so many people, we ran into some bandwidth issues too. My audio was lagging or I couldn’t hear them or five people talked over each other – it was a mess, to say the least.
Towards the end of the presentation when in a millisecond between going from one slide to the other someone shouted: “you guys came home again and my internet went to shit! Turn off your Xbox”. Holly shit! There were 5 of us in the conference room and we all looked at each other. I couldn’t laugh, I had to keep it cool, but man! It was total silence for about maybe one or two seconds, but it felt like an hour until he realized that he was not on mute! What a shame! I moved on and finished the presentation and then I exploded. I wish I was recording it.
This incident became an inside joke and made me be extra cautious when doing Zoom, or WebEx, or whatever. As I said, it is somehow normal now. People taking a leak during town halls or I even seen a Zoom video that one of the participants was having sex unaware that her webcam is on. Can you imagine that? You watch live porn! Anyway, I’m guilty of talking while I wasn’t mute. Mine wasn’t as bad as that Xbox guy, but it was an all-hands call, so you know everyone is listening and it is not a good sign when the director calls your name in the middle of his presentation and asks you to basically shut up! I thought I was mute, but my wife walked in and we started talking about going to Lowe’s and getting a plunger!! Thankfully we weren’t speaking English. So, the moral of the story is to learn more than one language and always triple-check and make sure you are mute if you decide to talk to your wife or yell at your kids!
Inherently Funny! 