The Middle-Aged Zoomer

Fiona has taken to video-conferencing like a cat to water.

Being old enough to think the view from the Sacre Coeur looks much nicer in her photographs when it isn’t half-obliterated by her own face, she’s unpractised at selfies and has never learned the art of looking her best – or at least of avoiding looking her worst – on social media. So when she joins her first online office meeting and sees herself peering closely at her screen, she is appalled by her resemblance to her own unbaked sourdough loaf. This bread has been the pride of her lockdown and she has kindly bestowed upon her Facebook friends pictures of it at every stage of inception, but it is not a thing of cosmetic beauty. Fiona spends the first half of the meeting reversing as imperceptibly as possible away from her computer until she is a tiny dot. Then she can’t hear anything. Not that she’s listening anyway, because once recovered from her dough-face mortification she becomes engrossed by her colleagues’ interior decoration choices. This is much more fun than watching Grand Designs – whoever would have thought that Bernard from Accounts had such appalling taste? Fiona realises too late that she is sitting in front of a radiator festooned with drying knickers.

By the next meeting her colleagues have worked out how to set virtual backgrounds and Fiona is amazed to see Bernard sitting in the Grand Canyon. She tries to do this too and ends up turning herself into a potato which she can’t undo and which somewhat compromises the authority with which she gives her Strategic Planning presentation.

By her third meeting she’s learnt to sit a mile from her screen with her back to the light and her laptop perched on a pile of books so that the camera angle doesn’t look up her nose or give her a double chin. Then her partner wanders in and, wrongly assuming Fiona is sensible enough to have her microphone switched off during her longwinded supervisor’s presentation of the monthly figures, says in a loud voice, ‘Is he still banging on? No wonder you all call him Droning Derek.’

Fiona decides that Zoom is a new Act of God against which she is just as helpless as against floods and earthquakes. On the day before the next session she emails her supervisor to say she’s in bed with suspected coronavirus. He emails back: ‘Sorry to hear that. Get well soon. Droning Derek.’

© C P Jenkinson 03/05/2020

For more Corona Caricatures follow the links below, or for a full list click the Archive at the top of this page.

To receive email notification of future posts please fill in the form on the Homepage. No marketing or spam, promise.

Thank you for reading and please share!