Lessons from Lockdown: to Zoom or not to ZoomI’m writing this piece some weeks before it’s due to appear on Sharon’s blog and the UK is emerging from the strictest part of lockdown. For a while now, we’ve been going back outside, blinking in the light. It’s my fervent hope that there won’t be a second spike and, when you read this, we’ll be beating a path back to normality and rebuilding our shattered economy.
But let’s wind back time to 23rd March when the country went into lockdown. As I recall, we spent the first few days in a state of collective shell shock. Would flour and fresh vegetables ever reappear on the supermarket shelves? How would we cope without loo paper? We reached out to friends and family in long phone calls and emails, knowing it might be months before we could meet in real life.
Being human, we needed a visual connection. Groping our way from isolation, we tried Facetime, WhatsApp video and Skype. A friend, who has been studying for an online degree, told us about Zoom. Her university had been using it for tutorials and seminars. We decided to give it a go. I like to think we were early adopters. I’ve been zooming ever since.
Those early days of Zoom were pure chaos. Comedian, Michael McIntyre posted a clip of zoomers looking smart above the waist while wearing baggy boxers on their nether regions. He mentioned how every conversation started with: ‘Can you hear me? Turn your microphone on? It’s in the bottom left hand corner,’ and managed to make it sound funny. It wasn’t.
