First rule of videoconferencing: Make sure you know what’s going on behind you.
A Fordham University professor got a bit of a peepshow last week during their first online lecture.
The student’s hair was tousled and she had a strange, sated look in her eye, and as the class prepared to sign off of their videoconference, the professor immediately guessed what was going on.
“I could see a nude man rising from a sofa in her living room, and it was clear from her face that she had just had a great night,” said the professor about his first experience on Zoom, a videoconferencing tool that he is now using to teach his class of 90 students. “When I saw him, I immediately paused the video and looked away.”
With coronavirus forcing students and office workers to plug their webcams into home computers, many are struggling with the technology and having to adapt new rules of etiquette as cameras suddenly expose the minutest details of their personal lives.
When a Manhattan-based marketing manager found herself on a Zoom video chat with two other co-workers last week, she realized she had forgotten to take care of some basic things.
“Oh my God, I haven’t brushed my hair today, and I haven’t put on any make-up,” said the marketing manager who did not want to be identified.
On top of that, she and her boyfriend had rented a tiny room at an inn in the Hamptons to self-quarantine, and he was in the bathroom “making bathroom noises” while she was on the call.
“I was so embarrassed that I had to mute it right away,” she said.
Others have had to learn to be sensitive to their colleagues in other parts of the world where coronavirus has had devastating consequences.
The first time Boston-based investment marketing consultant Gabriel Altbach used Zoom last week, his virtual team of 25 people around the globe started their business meeting by swapping stories of their experiences about working from home. Workers in the UK turned their cameras to their pets and children, he said. When Altbach began showing off his beloved Siamese cat, Yuki, a London-based co-worker who is originally from Italy, began to sob uncontrollably.
“I felt like an ass for being jovial when she was feeling so distraught and being vulnerable with her coworkers,” said Altbach, the North America director of White Marble Marketing. “On the one hand, we want to act like life goes on and keep everyone’s spirits up, but on the other, it’s obviously a horrible tragedy. And then layer on top of it all of us trying to interact via webcams making it really hard to read people’s body language and moods.”
History professor Honor Sachs documented on Twitter last week her struggles with setting up the videoconferencing technology that allowed her to conduct two classes for more than 100 students at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
She told The Post she had a recurring nightmare that all of the PowerPoint slides she posted for an online lecture turned out to be Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream.”
“People who regularly do online teaching have an enormous skill set,” she said. “Right now it’s a challenge because we are all trying to learn the technology, do school and find toilet paper at the same time. And toilet paper is winning.”
When she first began her online courses, Sachs told The Post that she felt like she was “yelling into the wind,” and that her students wanted to do as little work as possible.
“But they surprised me,” she said. “Many of them thanked me and said they felt better about everything just knowing I was there, and hearing my voice.”