In this Terrible Threesome, Doireann, Ellen, and Andy discuss their quarantine Zoom experience.
Ellen Duggan
I gave up on zoom calls perhaps three days into lockdown.
Group zoom calls give me the same kind of bodily feeling associated with consuming too much shite TV in one sitting, one that I would get as a ten year old, when I would run home from school and watch reruns of ‘Loose Women’.
Before this epiphany, I had attended meditation zoom classes, dance classes and met a newborn baby through the app. All of these were fine, but I simply cannot attempt to socialise on that thing.
In the last call I took part in, my friend Dougie disappeared from the call with a ‘GONE FISHING’ sign presented over his camera. He then returned with a human sized puppet that he had made and continued to communicate through the puppet. This was the last straw. I was absolutely not in the mood for mischief. I sat quietly for three minutes, sipping Tempranillo and then decided to turn off my phone - citing ‘battery problems’ in the group chat the next morning.
It is the most aggressive thing I have ever done and probably ever will do. Either zoom sucks, or my friends suck. But I am not arsed to investigate the latter.
Doireann de Courcy Mac Donnell
Being a Zoombie is a real thing. I know it sounds like a word your uncle’s buddy would use but it has its place. It’s the stupor you fall into as a the same old dumb-dumb asks yet another question which has already been answered fifteen million times if they had bothered to use their smooth brain in the first place.
I use Zoom all the time, and not because I have any great love of the app. It’s because people, in general, are more approachable and coherent face-to-face. However I say ‘in general’ - this week I was proved wrong. I called someone recently because I was sure that I had picked up their tone wrong through their snarky email. Nope, equally unpleasant, in fact possibly actually aggressive, through the call.
If Zoom neither saves me from meetings running forty minutes longer than they were scheduled, and an hour longer than they needed to, or passive-aggressive admin women (actually scrap the passive, just aggressive), what even is the point.
If a new-fangled communicative gimmick had to drop off the face of the earth, why did Netflix Party go? Surely it could have been Zoom.
Andrew Nolan
Lockdown left us with little but Zoom and your local Centra to keep us rational. Honestly, the highlight of this time for me was clicking onto JustEat approximately 24 times a week (if you’re around Tallaght, order some Pizza Mór. I will accept all thanks via email).
Services like Zoom and Discord played a huge part in avoiding complete isolation. Since my friends and I couldn’t meet up to celebrate Easter, we just arranged a call instead. And in true lockdown spirit, we did the best we could do given the circumstance... which resulted in getting respectably drunk and playing Uno for hours. I genuinely don’t think I could recommend this enough. Sneakily slapping a friend with a +4 is one thing; doing it when they’re five vodkas deep and already losing is an absolute masterpiece.
I would love to say that we called it in early so we could do tomorrow’s assignments, but we then ended up glued to Minecraft until around 5am. As you would do.
Lockdown taught me one important message; just enjoy yourself mate. And if that means almost drunkenly pre-booking two tattoos while your friends on Discord encourage you, that’s fine.