If you give a temporarily teleworking office drone a Tuesday,

She’s going to want to look reasonably unlike a swamp witch for her 4pm video call.

And if she is going to look unlike a swamp witch, she’s going to want to shower.

But before she showers, she’s going to want to do some yoga.

If you give her a gap between meetings for yoga, someone will knock at that time to repair the door.

If she waits to do yoga until he has repaired the door, someone will ask her for a lunchtime meeting.

If she pushes back the lunchtime meeting so she can squeeze the yoga in, she’s going to need some tea.

To make the tea, she’ll need to boil some water.

If she’s boiling water, she’ll make a salad while the kettle goes.

If she makes a salad, she will open the crisper drawer and discover that it’s all full of little tiny bits of broccoli florets.

If she discovers the broccoli florets, she’s going to empty the crisper drawer to clean it out with a damp rag.

If she empties the crisper drawer, she will need to rearrange the contents of the fridge.

If she rearranges the contents of the fridge, she will begin to plan what to make for dinner.

If she contemplates what to make for dinner, she will recall that she is mid-salad preparation.

If she recalls her salad preparation, she will remember that the water has long since boiled.

If she makes the tea, she will realize her meeting will begin in one minute.

If she is almost late to her meeting, she has not prepared for her meeting.

If she has not prepared, she will shrug and decide to sit outside on the deck for the meeting.

If she sits outside on the deck, she will be tempted to yell “Free range compost!” and throw the teabag into the bushes.

If she throws the teabag into the bushes, she will spend several minutes of her meeting distracted, wondering if her dubiously legal composting method was caught on CCTV.

If she’s fretting about surveillance, she will have the idea to write this blog post.

If she’s taking down her ideas for this blog post, she will realize that her laptop does not connect to the remote server very well on the deck.

If she reconnects to the server, she will become irritated that this coworker is asking for a status update on this rather urgent project.

I mean, she’ll say, Kevin, come on, I’m pretty slammed here, dude.

You know conference calls, I trust?

(If not, teach me your secrets!)

In case you’re new to them, how shall I describe them? Perhaps I’ll say they’re a technology for many humans to try to talk at once, and somehow simultaneously also for no one to talk for quite a long and awkward time, from different locations. They’re also quite possibly the greatest-ever advance in human boredom-creation technology. 

If you’re a conference call veteran, then you’ll know the feeling of awkwardly announcing your presence, then waiting for fifty-five minutes absently refreshing your email while someone explains something in great detail that one other person on the twenty-person call needed to know, and then pretending to have enjoyed the experience when you, with a vast sigh of relief, say “Thanks, everyone!” and press the big red button just in time for lunch.

Now, introducing: conference calls in the time of COVID! 

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Corporations are indeed people. 

I mean this on an emotional level, not a legal one, and I hope you will soon agree.

Have you ever talked to a corporation? Of course you have. As you’ll remember: they are coy. Like a sequestered fairy-tale princess, they do not permit to be spoken to directly. You must approach from a distance. You must find the allowable envoy, the maidservant at the castle gate who can take a message.

Or, rather, you must call the 800 number and navigate the inside of a computer using your phone’s keypad (a knightly quest!) before you can reach the inner keep.

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Full disclosure: this blog is not (yet) an international phenomenon. 

However, it does get a fair number of comments (but not page visits, puzzlingly) from people based in other countries who would very much like for me to click on their links and probably provide my banking information.

So that’s something like being an international phenomenon.

I have a lot to learn from these commenters. They are expert in the rarefied arts of both marketing and flattery. 

Don’t get me wrong: some of them still post treatises about global conspiracies to kill us all through RFID chips, and some are tactless enough to come right out and say that they want me to click on lots of grody links to infect myself.

But many of them, wearing the guise of a credibly middle-America-sounding name like Bob Democracyman, have cleverly decided to provide compliments and no links. Just flattery. 

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