That’s It. Meeting Cancelled
Video conference meetings are modern society’s great equalizer—no matter how important you are, at some point, you will be reduced to a frozen, pixelated face screaming “Can you hear me now?” while your coworker’s dog barks the national anthem in the background. These digital gatherings have perfected the art of chaos, blending technical failures, domestic disasters, and human incompetence into a symphony of frustration.
First, there’s the echo. Somehow, one person’s microphone picks up the entire meeting and broadcasts it back on a 0.5-second delay, creating a cosmic horror of overlapping voices that makes it sound like you’re trapped in a conference call from the Upside Down. No one knows who causes it, and no one knows how to fix it, so the solution is always the same: everyone mutes themselves, then unmutes to talk, then forgets they’re unmuted and starts complaining about the meeting itself.
Then there’s the background noise Olympics. Crying babies, doorbells, spouses yelling about something unrelated, and the inevitable ”I’m not on mute?” realization after someone spends a full minute critiquing the presenter’s slides to their cat. The pinnacle of this art form is when someone’s microphone picks up their furious keyboard typing, amplifying their passive-aggressive note-taking like a dramatic ASMR performance.
And who could forget the mute struggle? The presenter asks for questions, only to be met with silence—not because no one has any, but because half the attendees are gesturing wildly at their screens, mouthing “You’re on muteE” to someone who will remain oblivious for a full minute. Meanwhile, the one person who is unmuted is either eating chips directly into the mic or has their fan turned up to “wind tunnel,” drowning out all human speech.
The true masterpiece of virtual meetings, though, is the ”I was sharing my screen this whole time?” reveal—when someone finally notices they’ve been broadcasting their messy desktop, complete with 47 open tabs, a half-written resignation letter, and an incriminating Slack chat they definitely didn’t mean to show.
Discussion ¬