Member-only story
The life-draining magic of online meetings
We’ll Get Started in a Minute, Folks
That’s a big fat lie, but please continue staring at your screen
Prior to 2020, video conferencing was still novel. It felt cool and high-tech, a little Star-Trekky, despite how clumsy Skype was back then.
But that was the Before Times. Once the Plague Years hit and Zoom zoomed into our working lives, in-person meetings evaporated like the smoke you could no longer smell on your coworkers’ clothes, because you were never again in the same room with them.
There were other advantages, besides avoiding exposure to a possibly deadly virus.
Instead of having to board an airplane and travel to corporate headquarters for the Big Thing, or even having to drag yourself to the conference room down the hall for the weekly staff update, you could remain comfortably at your desk and on your rump while the little faces imprisoned in rectangles accumulated on your screen.
You could attend a meeting from anywhere! From home, from your car, even from the back room of Fred’s Tavern, if nobody out front was blasting the music or playing billiards.
And it wasn’t just work meetings. Nearly any kind of class or consultation that had once…
