In honor of St. Patrick’s day, my three siblings and I decided to do
a virtual happy hour on St. Patrick’s day. I don’t want to say we’ve all had a
jump on this social distancing thing, but we did have to do an ice breaker to
get to know each other again.
And our Zoom videoconferencing happy hour is just like a
real happy hour except with a delay from a 1950s transatlantic phone call. Apparently modern videoconferencing expects
people to talk One. At. A. Time…and well…that’s just not how the McC’s roll. Like all good Irish people, there can be 4 of
us in a room and six different conversations going on. And now thanks to Covid, Zoom
(!) gets to decide who gets heard. And I thought
we were all competing for attention before…. The whole point of virtual happy hours is to
facilitate interaction and here we are having to mute the line. For the next call we’ll install buzzers and
go full game-show. Speaking of which, I’m
pretty sure my mom thought she was watching Hollywood Squares for the first half of the call (and that I was Paul Lynde).
And just in case the slight delay didn’t make the call hard
enough to follow, my sister tried repeating the high points throughout the call
to my 82 yr. old mother listening through a daisy-chained set of hearing aids. So every really clever snippet was first repeated
by the speaker (lest it get lost in the delay and someone missed the cleverness)
and then reenacted again for my mother. It
wasn’t so much a happy hour as a killer dress rehearsal of “row, row, row your
boat”.
My brother’s cat is clearly taking the social distancing
harder than the rest of us. The laptop
on the counter seemed like a great video angle until I saw more of that cat’s behind
than I did of my brother. This is what a
happy hour with Banksy is like.
After verifying that even if she hasn’t seen another soul for
six days, my mother still doesn’t want to talk to us on the phone, we all signed
off while humming ~Life is but a dream ~
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