A Video Meeting IRL

Quite the foresight. This 3min sketch comedy treatment is from Jan 2014.

The top comment on the buzzfeed page on this is from ‘sharkfighter’, with this extra gem;

What about the part where someone who is supposed to talk about something important doesn’t show up until halfway through the call.

Oh, Barbra has the info on that.
Barbra are you here yet!?
…no?
Okay.
…well, we can’t talk about that until Barbra gets here.

The above original got re-written, almost two years on, as a viral offering from Zoom. A different treatment with new gags peppered throughout.

It does make you imagine for a moment what a remixed version might look like following the mass-adoption event of 2020.

People would simply get up and walk out at random. Then saunter back in similar fashion. Have conversations with people outside, whilst still inside the room. Take a phone call while you’re speaking. Scrolling through their phone while you get to the meat of your presentation. Not to mention wearing pyjama bottoms, stroking their pet, monitoring their child’s schoolwork, chatting to someone dropping off a delivery.

And perhaps the big ones, being in other meetings or doing other (parallel) work at length, at the same time too.

Not to mention altered in-person surrounds. Who’d bring their own personalised visual backdrop? Could each attendee have their own ‘cell’, to design as they wish? Whether as characterless perfunctory greige, even blurred or the real zanity of moving video. Maybe the meeting is held in the company kitchen. Or instead of around a table, circling a sofa. What about something designed to be more ‘edgy’? Replete with a kaleidoscope of colours, spaceship bridge of gadgetry and furniture straight from a kiddies soft-play area? You know, like in the new office of a freshly minted Unicorn app?

And you could have a field day showing a graphic. Or rather, trying to show one.

Then imagine the moment a juicy new piece of corporate intel drops from the chief exec’s office into the message channel.

You’ve no doubt encountered at least one of these recently.

Or transporting setting this way might give you ideas anew.

They key is in knowing how you handle them. Especially if you’re the one ‘selling’ when the torpedo, or spark,  strikes…