The eleven types of Zoom meetings

1.           Zoom meeting that could have been an email.

2.           Zoom meeting that could have been an email, except that let’s face it no one would have answered the email, or even read past the first bullet point, let alone clicked on the link to the Google Doc that needs editing by the group, so fine, let’s do this in real time.  That’s not awkward at all.

3.           Zoom meeting that is not actually a Zoom meeting because someone works for the National Academy of Making Things Impossible.  Okay, fine, we’re using the different software you recommended.  No one understands the software, except for Tiffany, who is unable to download the software because she’s hotspotting from her minivan.  Despite the software change, Nigel is still stuck behind a firewall. 

4.           My kids’ Zoom chemistry class.  Involves rummaging in the cupboards for baking soda and fielding sudden urgent questions about electron orbitals.  Invariably occurs simultaneously with #5.

5.           Zoom meeting that requires laser-like focus and Herculean organizational skills lest I look like an idiot in front of my most influential colleagues and/or people who can fire me.

6.           Meeting that is really a presentation.  I am not touching that unmute button, ever.  My camera is off.  Of course I’m here.  Why would you question whether I’m here during your monologue?  Totally here.

7.           Meeting that is really a phone call.  I don’t need to look at anything or anyone, and I’m very sure that no one needs to look at me.  I am entirely cogent, fully contributing, and no one needs to know that I’m taking a walk with my ear buds and phone.  What do you mean, is that the sound of a backhoe?

8.           Meeting in which I can openly admit that I’m taking a walk, because you’ve all been working with me for a decade and you haven’t managed to get rid of me yet.  Yeah.  Totally a backhoe.

9.           My kids’ Zoom gym class.  Noisy.  Makes the house vibrate.  Smells like teenagers, even though 28 of the 30 students are not physically present.  Conducted with cameras and microphones off, entirely on the honor system.  Causes me to vacillate between pride over my children’s obvious honor, and the desire for less honorable children.

10.         Zoom meeting that could have been a semaphore message from a remote windswept hilltop.

11.         Zoom meeting during which I’m writing this list of types of Zoom meetings.

Leaning ... toward baking cookies for the office

Photo courtesy of the Breakup Triathlon

A few days ago, a friend of mine brought my attention to an online story highlighting Susan Stamberg's stellar career with National Public Radio.  The article – perhaps inspired by the recent Lean In buzz -- focused on the question of what advice older women would give to their younger selves.  Reader comments were numerous, but my friend enthused that “by far the best comment” was:  “Dear Self: To be taken seriously, dress better and learn earlier how to act like a pro in meetings. Keep your "business face" on in all communications and don't bake for the office.”

When I saw this, I blanched. If this quote offered any indication of the grading scale by which I am measured, I thought, I am not just doing poorly; I am earning an irredeemable F.

Professionalism is not my strong suit. 

Last Sunday, I was standing around in Spandex shorts and a sports bra, drenched, when I spotted someone I knew.  I greeted her by name, my voice only slightly obscured by the huge chunk of honey-oat bagel I was shoving in my mouth. 

She smiled uncertainly – the polite greeting of someone who has no idea who the heck you are, but is much too nice to say so.

“I’m Nancy,” I reminded her.  Was it the raggedly dripping pigtails on either side of my head that threw her off, or was the bare skin of my torso blinding her with its fish-underbelly whiteness?  “I interviewed you for the ACCAP job last week.”  Then I bit off another large hunk of bagel.

Dignity and I are not closely acquainted.  Not ever, not in any context.  But should I, I wondered, be trying a bit harder in the “professional” realm?

Officially, I’m the Network Coordinator at the Scenarios Network for Alaska and Arctic planning, a climate change research group at the University of Alaska.  Unofficially, the nametag outside my cubicle grants me the title “Head Monkey.”  It was put up about three years ago by a coworker (and friend), as a joke.  It sports a photo of a chimp (which, I of course know as a biologist, is an ape, not a monkey).  It was never taken down. 

I regularly wander around the office in sweatpants, T-shirts left over from college, and bare feet. I make jokes in meetings – and some of them are vaguely risqué.  I sign my emails “N,” call people by their first names regardless of rank, and admit to my collaborative partners at government agencies that my work schedule is dictated by when the school bus comes and goes.  I also (oh, the shame!) wantonly leave apple cake and leftover brownies on the break room table.

Is this really so wrong?  And does it have anything to do with gender?

Well, maybe.  I can’t possibly comment on Lean In, in which Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, exhorts women to strive for the professional pinnacle.  For one thing (note to internet commenters in general – this is kinda a key point with regard to vehement and vituperative editorializing), I haven’t read it.  However, I do know that women are still mired in a wage-gap rut that has barely closed in my lifetime.  ABC news reports that “Women working full-time earned just 80.9 percent of what men earned per week in 2012.”  The Center for American Progress Action Fund puts the figure at 77%.

There's simply no joking about this.  It’s a problem long overdue for a solution, and it pisses me off.  But if I (a PhD-holder and a research professor, for heaven's sake) am not setting myself up to be taken seriously, am I somehow part of the problem?

Ok, I lack dignity, I tell myself defensively, but it doesn’t have anything to do with being a woman.  Besides, I usually have a reason for it.  My semi-nude bagel-consumption was perfectly logical, given that I had just completed a triathlon.  The young woman I’d interviewed – who was, in fact, the top candidate for the job – had done the same.  She was just as damp as I was, and probably just as hungry.  Moreover, there was no clear avenue toward “professionalism” in this soggy context, because I was in the awkward position of not being able to tell her that we were about to offer her the position.  The paperwork hadn’t yet cleared with HR.  (Gods of bureaucracy, I have you in my sights, y’hear?)

Instead, I started a conversation about something I knew she’d relate to.  At her interview, she’d mentioned that she’d been out of the workforce for a short time because she has a two-year-old.  So I talked about small children.  And stomach flu.  That’s right – knowing exactly how much I had in common with this vibrant young scientist, based on her résumé and her interests, I talked about my puking first grader.  And when, a few minutes later, I spotted another post-race coworker in the poolside crowd, we talked about … daycare for her toddler.

I know, I know.  Anyone care for a stereotype with their bagel?  How on earth can I be taken seriously if I don’t know how to “keep my business face on”?  Indeed, many debaters in the wage wars argue that women earn less than men because they choose to do so.  Women pick careers that are less stressful, more flexible, more open to part-time employment, more “female” – so that they can spend more time with family.  On the other hand, others argue that the reason women choose to be the ones to take more time off with kids is because they are being paid less to begin with.  

Either way, was this a choice I made?  And if it was, should I feel defensive about it?  Irascible?  Guilty? What flavor of guilty?

I like chocolate-chip-guilty the best – I always have.  Luckily, when I went back to work on Monday morning, I found that our IT director, wizard of computer hardware and cookies, had left a generous number of the latter in the break room.  He’s a new dad, and working only part time these days, but he still manages to keep up with the software licensing, the network issues, all our terabytes of data storage, and the gooey treats.

As it happened, my boss was home sick that day.  His two little girls had passed on to their daddy the latest horrific chest cold.  Luckily, he got hold of me via email.  Sure, I told him, I could cover the interview he had scheduled with the guy from Switzerland’s public radio.  This sort of thing happens regularly around here, and we always cover for one another.  When the temperature hits forty or fifty below zero, people’s cars get finicky.  There are sudden dental emergencies; sick parents who live on the other side of the map; and ailing dogs.  Once, my boss called me at the last minute to give a presentation for him.  He couldn’t make it in to the office, he explained, because his goat was kidding. 

When the Swiss guy showed up, I was wearing old jeans and a t-shirt, but that was fine, because so was he – and this was a radio interview, after all.  I told him a heck of a lot about climate change science in the far north.  I also told him about the vagaries of living in an environment underlain by thawing discontinuous permafrost.  I described how Jay and I built our cabin.  I described the variety of biomes to be seen in the space of the half-mile walk to the school bus stop.  He asked more questions about those personal aspects of the interview than about anything else.  We called each other by our first names, and I offered him coffee.

Back at my desk, I found an email from our tech lead.  Like me, he’s part of the office’s four-person “management team”.  “A few of us are headed over to HooDoo today after work.  If others would like to join, I'll pitch in for a few pizzas…”  He’d cc’d the entire staff list. 

Well, why not?  If you work in a cool office, then everyone is invited to the local brewing company at the end of the day.

Somewhere between the brewery invitation and the quick dash across the road with the inhabitant of the cubicle next to mine to see if Hotlicks Ice Cream had opened for the season, I decided that the well-meaning advice about how to be taken seriously as a Professional Woman was not so much wrong, as utterly inside-out. 

We don’t need women to dress better.  We don’t need them to “keep their business face on” at the expense of taking time to care for their children -- or their parents, or their dogs, or their goats.  We certainly don’t need them to stop baking chocolate-swirl pound cake with streusel topping.  What we need is for men to do all these things, too.  And at my office, it’s happening.

Yes, it’s important to Get Stuff Done at work.  Yes, sometimes we all need to stop multi-tasking and focus on getting the report written, the documents signed, and the &%$@ paperwork back from HR.  Sometimes it’s even necessary to come in and work a bit of utterly unpaid overtime on the weekend (although if you’re a non-exempt employee you must never, ever admit to this, lest you face dire consequences such as paperwork, and maybe spanking).  Being professional can be important, and I even have a few semi-respectable clothing items to prove it.  But in my opinion, being human is more important than being “professional” – for women and for men.

Being human means having a life that’s complicated, messy, multifaceted, rewarding, funny, and real.  It means juggling the pieces to make them fit as best you can.  When I drop by the office on weekends, I bring along the kids, and let them draw on the one-sided paper supply and make cool stuff out of the cardboard and plastic recycling.  Jay does the same.  No one has ever complained about stray rainbows on the whiteboards.  Being human means passing on our well-worn stroller/bike trailer to the guy down the hall with a new baby, giving the little green pull-wagon and wooden cars to the triathlete with a toddler girl, and donating the itty-bitty moose slippers to whomever snagged them from the break room.  I’m not sure who that was, but there are an awful lot of small people to choose from.  And if the coworker who asks me for breast-feeding advice when we run into each other at the coffee pot is male, I’m not in the least bit surprised.

Of course, even as I paint this rosy picture, I know I’m incredibly lucky.  I work thirty hours per week.  So does Jay.  We use the extra time to hang out with our kids, take part in ludicrous outdoor adventures, and (upon occasion) bake stuff.  We choose to live an inexpensive lifestyle, but we’re also immensely fortunate to have the skills, the degrees, and the jobs required to make this workable.  Most people don’t.

This brings me back to that wage gap, and all the politics and social injustice that go with it – a hydra of a problem if ever there was one.  The United States is woefully backward with regard to affordable childcare, healthcare coverage (particularly for part time workers) and wage gaps not only between males and females, but also between CEOs and workers.  I could rant about this for pages (or for hours, depending on whether you like to take your rants visually or aurally) but that would be, as I’ve been noting in fifty different spots on the spreadsheet-du-jour, “Outside the scope of this project.”

I will add, however, one salient postscript.  In the ABC article I perused, Ariane Hegewisch of the Institute for Women's Policy Research notes that “there may also be some reluctance to hire women for high-powered, lucrative jobs when there is the chance that they may take time off in the future to have children.” 

Our top candidate for that ACCAP job – the mother of the two-year-old – mentioned in the course of the interview that she plans to have another child. 

Well, excellent.  When she does, maybe someone will have an extra car seat or a pair of moose slippers to pass on to her.  It will be easy to find her -- because yesterday the Bureaucracy Gods reached down from on high and gave us the green light.

Welcome, New Person.  I’m the Head Monkey; feel free to ask me whatever you’d like.  There are muffins on the counter.  I hear you enjoy triathlons…

Phone on mute, arms like Kali

“That was fast,” says my coworker Brook.  She is invisible behind our bilge-colored Dilbert-wall, but I can hear the laughter in her voice. 

It takes me a moment to figure out what she thinks is funny.  Then I realize she has just received an email from me in response to the one she sent five minutes earlier -- despite the fact that she has heard me yakking away on the phone for the past hour. 

Well, sure, I send emails while on teleconferences -- but isn’t that normal?  I protest -- my phone on mute -- that everyone does other stuff during long meetings.

They do, Brook admits.  “But not when they’re actually presenting. That’s beyond my level of multi-tasking.”

She has a point; I might be taking this a bit too far. In my world, multi-tasking is not just an occasional spurt of hyperactivity; it’s hard-wired.  The kids’ bike trailer is littered with Corn Bran and desiccated raisins, because breakfast, commuting, and comically inadequate bike-race-training are all simultaneous activities.  My laptop is full of cat hair and crumbs.  I listen to novels while skiing, and I have Serious Conversations -- phone wedged under my ear -- while assembling Lego dump trucks.  I can’t remember the last time I ate lunch while 1) sitting at a table and 2) not discussing downscaled climate change models.  I think it’s been six years since I shopped for groceries by myself, without small people on hand to assist (“The apple I dropped is only bruised on ONE side, Mommy”), philosophize (“Why do the bad-for-you cereals have the best pictures on the boxes?”), and editorialize (“Look, Mommy, that man has only one arm!”).  If I’m not doing two things at once, it’s because I’m doing three. 

The voices of my project collaborators are still burbling from my headset.  Every once in a while – even as I triage the rest of my inbox and chat with Brook -- I leap into the conversation to answer a question about permafrost thaw or biome shift.   I try to make sure that when I do so, my mouth is not too full of scrambled eggs and spinach.  Still, I feel guilty – and worried.

I’d like to think that all this activity is a mark a great efficiency and productivity, but I fear that it’s actually a mark of being a frenetic stereotype.  Sure, I’m doing three things at once, but what if I’m doing them all badly?  I wonder whether I’m a parody of myself, my gender, and my generation.  Haven’t there been articles recently about how everyone manages this a lot better in France?  Or maybe it was Sweden.  I’m not sure of the details, because I only read the first paragraph, and I was creating a spreadsheet and settling an argument about Scotch tape at the same time.

The folks at the other end of the phone line can’t see my dirty dishes, or anything that may be lodged between my front teeth.  In fact, none of them have ever met me.  For all they know, I could be a willowy bombshell who does not ever scrawl notes on the back of kindergarten worksheets while slapping together peanut-butter sandwiches. But Brook knows better. 

“Of course, I don’t have kids,” she adds, kindly offering me a ready-made excuse.  But I’m not sure I can use it.  My kids aren’t signed up for Tai Kwon Do, gymnastics, math tutoring, or basket weaving.  By the standards of the era, they are total slackers, hanging out making mudpies and chasing stink bugs all summer instead of learning about Mozart – or being Mozart, for that matter.  And they’re hopeless at doing more than one thing at once.

A few weeks ago, as the clock was creeping toward nine p.m., I was watching with mounting frustration as my children meandered through their getting-ready-for-bed process.  “Mommy, you know what I was wondering?” One of the twins was standing stock-still in the middle of their bedroom – which was so littered with toys and half-complete craft projects that I had to shovel a path to the bunk beds – and holding a sock in her hand.

“You can tell me about it WHILE you put your pajamas on,” I snapped.

Her face crumpled.  “But Mommy, I don’t LIKE multi-tasking,” she wailed.

Oh. 

In the game of name-that-emotion, I couldn’t decide if I was more perturbed by the fact that: a) this particular neologism was part of her kindergarten vocabulary; b) I was forcing my child into my own hyped-up mode; c) her mental capacities were such that simultaneously dressing and speaking were a challenge; or d) I was never ever going to get the kids to bed so that I could check emails, write novels, play online Scrabble, and munch chocolate (simultaneously, of course).

Back in the last millennium, I remember hearing my dad bemoan the fact that more and more reporters – his coworkers at Newsday – were eating lunch at their desks.  Couldn’t they take a few minutes to sit down in the lunchroom with a sandwich?  A few years later, he did an extensive piece of investigative journalism in which he brought to light just how many people were trying to make phone calls, drink coffee, wolf down breakfast burritos, and apply mascara all while piloting a vehicle at 70mph down a traffic-choked freeway.  The results were ugly – and I don’t just mean with regard to the mascara. 

Now everyone seems to be talking about it -- how we’re all kidding ourselves into thinking we have as many arms as an octopus, as many eyes as a spider, and the processing power of Google.  This modern era is destroying us!  We’re all going to Hades in a Multi-Purpose Canvas Messenger Bag with Leather Accents! 

There’s obviously some truth in this.  A while back, I almost got mowed down on a sidewalk by someone who was texting while biking.  But at the same time -- hasn’t This Modern Era always been destroying us?  Sure, our technology has changed so fast that I’m already bordering on being a techno-fossil.  But have we really changed all that much?  True, when I was little, our family didn’t eat in the car, the phone was firmly fastened to the wall, and a Blackberry was something that grew on prickly bushes at Heckscher Park.  But my mother did plenty of multi-tasking back in the days of wide lapels.  She sewed her own wardrobe, and mine as my sister’s as well, all on a hand-crank Singer from circa the Pleistocene.  She cooked dinner while listening to me read Frog and Toad are Friends from my perch on the kitchen stool.  She got her exercise by pushing a stroller, mowing the lawn, and hauling groceries.  She squeezed in her socializing from the vantage point of a playground bench, while being called upon to “Look at me!  Look at me!” every fifteen seconds.

Somewhere in the background of my teleconference, a dog barks.  I check that I’m still muted, although my dogs are safely at home.  I grin, imagining someone with papers scattered on a kitchen table, half eaten bagel balanced on a plate, and puppy trying grab a piece of attention from its on-the-phone owner.  Ok, so maybe that participant missed a few words of my cogent synopsis of projected shifts in growing-degree-days in the Northwest Territories.  But the tiny interruption makes my faceless collaborator human.  And I like humans.

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that multi-tasking was not forced on me by my generation, my ovaries, my computer, or my shoe size.  To one degree or another, our species has always done more than one thing at once, and been more than one thing at once, simply because we can.  We have convoluted, bulky, non-linear brains.   And I like that, too.

The truth is… I enjoy multi-tasking.  I’m kind of bored if I don’t have way too many projects going on at once, and I feel pigeon-holed if I don’t have more than one identity.  I like being a scientist, a mom, a wanna-be-writer, a baker of gooey cakes, a do-it-yourself builder, and a back-of-the-pack athlete.  Maybe I don’t do any of this very well, but I don’t want to give any of it up.  Is this really so bad?

I don’t think multi-tasking can be pilloried if the tasks in question are walking the dogs through a nice squelchy swamp, searching for ladybugs and cranberry blossoms, collecting mosquito larvae in plastic cups, blowing soap bubbles, snacking on fresh peaches, and discussing the hydrologic cycle (can you say “evapotranspiration,” kids?)   On Tuesday, the twins pedaled behind me on our goofy-looking double-tag-along to the park, the library, the thrift store, and the grocery store.  While pedaling, we discussed gardening, the transit of Venus, and the local wildlife: “Do you see the ducks under the bridge – no, not there, on the left!” (We were also, apparently, learning to tell left from right.) 

I figure there’s a happy medium in there, somewhere between doing-it-all and Hang Up and Drive.  I was browsing an article on cognitive psychology (you know, just for fun, while sorting socks) and learned about the Goldilocks Principle.  Infants, it seems, will seek out the just-right level of stimulation to meet their learning abilities: not too simple, not to complex.  I like this idea, because it allows me the freedom to be my own Goldilocks.  I can send emails, talk to scientists in California, and eat eggs, all at once -- even if Brook thinks I’m nuts. 

There are only (in my mental rulebook, that is) three caveats regarding multi-tasking:

1.       People matter.  The lost lunch breaks that my dad mourned weren’t really about his coworkers doing more work; they were about his friends socializing less. 

2.       Be your own Goldilocks, not your kids’ Goldilocks.  If they want to stare at a leaf for half an hour, fine.  Unless it’s bedtime, in which case, brush your teeth already, will you?

3.       Don’t be an idiot.  You don’t need to put on that mascara right now.  Really.

My teleconference ends at last – just in time, because I need to hop on my bike.  I’ve got kids to pick up, and I think I promised to bake a pie for a charity barbecue.  It’s been a productive morning: I’ve led two presentations, answered a bunch of messages, picked the spinach from between my teeth, and started work on the next project – the one I promised to do for Brook, in that email I answered.  I told her I would lead a teleconference next month.  It should be a fun one – although I’m guessing she won’t let me answer emails at the same time.