Blogs

By Etta Sedit

Never trust your mute. I mean NEVER. Not in a phone-line-based class, not when using your Bluetooth headset, the built-in microphone on your laptop, or earbuds. NEVER. If you’re watching TV during that important session, we will find out. Ditto if you yell at your kids, swear at your dog, crunch on your breakfast, or flush your toilet (but thanks for washing your hands). Take that call from your medical provider to discuss your nasal polyps in another room. Absolutely do not have a scathing telephone conversation with your supervisor about a coworker who is also in the meeting because you might just be unmuted. #truestory

If your Zoom session doesn’t require you to be on camera, do us a favor and don’t turn yours on. The rest of us don’t want to see your unmade bed, dingy home office walls, toy ship collection, or your bored expression. If you need to be on camera, look at your webcam instead of your screen and position your camera so that you’re looking up at it. We really don’t want the view up your nose. This advice is prudent for online dating profiles as well. Don’t be dumb and put up a virtual background that makes it look like you’re at the beach. Beach backgrounds were funny for like two seconds a long time ago and those backgrounds give you that weird head/halo thing anyways.

Learn some technical skills. I know technology can be hard, but it has been four years since most things moved online. Unless you’re the flagger on a road crew or the rink guard at your local roller-skating rink, you need to know some technology. Start with a laptop that is less than five years old. The salesperson at my favorite computer store tells me that all devices are obsolete at five years. If you’re having technical issues and I ask you, “How old is your laptop?” and the answer begins with, “Well I got it from my daughter, who got it from her aunt, who got it from her sister…” therein lies your problem. Also, get a headset. For God’s sake, GET A HEADSET. If you were wearing a headset right now, I wouldn’t have to repeat myself three times. GET A HEADSET. You can’t blame your lack of one on COVID supply chain shortages any longer. If your employer doesn’t provide one, just suck it up and buy one out of your own funds. Make sure it has a USB connector at the end that plugs into your laptop. USB connectors are shaped like a rectangle. The round connector ones are very last decade. Zoom, Adobe Connect, or other platforms may tell you that earbuds work, but they lied. You need a USB-cabled headset. I’m sorry you purchased a Bluetooth headset just for this class, but they’re crap for online platforms, possibly give you brain cancer, and have been known to bleed audio into the online room even when turned off. Please see above about never trusting your mute.

Sign in early to allow time for technical issues. How early? Thirty minutes is a good idea. Three minutes is a bad idea. In fact, start earlier than 30 minutes because you don’t want to find out too late that your device has decided to do a system update. Side note: you can go into your settings and tell your computer to only do updates during the wee hours of the night. Please do that. Early before the meeting is also a great time to learn that your internet is out because a drunk driver knocked down a telephone pole in your neighborhood overnight and will allow you time to switch to your cell phone hotspot or change work locations.

Be engaged in the session. Attendance is part of your job. If it’s a training session, your employer is paying for you to attend. Instructors and online tech support people such as myself know all about the trick of signing into the platform and pretending you are present while you nap/do other work/have sex or whatever else it is you fakers are doing when you’re supposed to be paying attention. If the instructor tells me they can’t reach you in private chat and then I can’t either and you don’t respond to audio callouts or tagging in the group chat, I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN. I’ll email you off-platform. I’ll call your work number. We will call your supervisor. I may even accidentally remove you from the room just to see if you notice. The instructor or meeting leader has invested a lot of time in preparing for the session and now, because of you, they feel like they’re talking to a blank wall. We are sick of people like you. If you are going to feign your attendance, then for goodness’ sake at least glance at the platform now and then, especially near the close. One dead giveaway that you weren’t paying attention—the meeting ends and you never sign out of the room. Nailed!

Be nice to your technical support people. Compliment them. Say please and thank you. They control much of your destiny in online rooms. Trust that maybe, just maybe, since they do technical support all day, five days a week, they have an inkling about what may be happening with your technology. Don’t contradict their advice by stating that you work in IT and so know all about these sort of things. You can IT all you want, but it doesn’t mean you’re the expert on a platform like Webex or Adobe Connect. Also, don’t be a male chauvinist because your tech support person is female. Believe me, after you’ve been trying your own brilliant ideas for an hour and then your microphone starts working once you finally follow her suggestions, you’ll be highly embarrassed. Techies will then enter you into a national database of people who were jerks during online events. This will haunt you forever.

For the folks who are not tech savvy, when your technical support person is troubleshooting with you during a telephone call, just follow instructions without reading her everything that appears on your screen. It isn’t uncommon for this person to be helping large numbers of people at once, so she needs to resolve your issue efficiently and has likely done these same steps 8,236 times. Along the same line, if you send her a private chat about an issue and she doesn’t respond in three seconds, don’t send another message, “HELLO???” We go out of our way for nice participants. Be nasty to us and you can go three days without a working microphone for all we care.

Lastly, when you need to speak in the online room, just unmute and begin speaking. It’s super annoying for 20 or 30 people to all start with, “Can you hear me?” I speak for everyone when I say, “Yes, we can hear you.”

—Etta Sedit

Etta Sedit is a queer femme, mother, and former professional house cleaner who, according to her friends and the cashier at her grocery store, is very funny. She is best known for her unusual dating life, knowledge of how to remove toilet bowl rings without chemicals, and the slightly untrue entries she makes in her son’s school tardy log.