Tag: Zoom

January 29th, 2024

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

The sun is out today, so if I can, I’ll take some brisk walks on the roof and perhaps take a few pictures to post from there. I say “if I can” because the job is revving up now, and I’m spending a lot of time on zoom and on updating our website the best I can. My afternoon and early evening are increasingly cluttered with meetings and obligations. At least at 6:00 pm, my quitting time if there’s no event, I don’t have a half-hour walk home, so I can immediately start on dinner.

At 11:00 am, we have a conference call — not a zoom — about the library’s contract with Kanopy. It’s a conference call and not a zoom because my supervisor, who arranged the meeting, is a night-bird. Her bed-time is 3:00 am, and she doesn’t usually get up until eleven in the morning. She is always the best looking person at zoom meetings, her make-up perfect, a hat tilted elegantly on her head . Hence, her insistence that she’s “tired of zoom and would rather talk by phone” when it comes to a meeting scheduled minutes after she gets out of bed. Can’t say I blame her. Yes, I’m an early riser, but the first part of my day is dedicated to writing, and at 11 AM I’m generally still in my bathrobe, have not put in my contacts and look like Roy Orbison.

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

Michael has not had to work in an office since the ’90s. His jobs include writing pieces about movies and filmmakers for various outlets and teaching classes. Much of the work and preparation for this is done at his desk here in the apartment. Before COVID-19, when he did leave the apartment, it was to teach in a classroom, or attend screenings, or introduce films or interview filmmakers in cafes or theaters.

He’s not, therefore, had to overhear the long conversations involved in my job, and he’s forgotten what office work often entails. As a result, by the end of yesterday he was almost explosive with exasperation from listening to hours of discussion that included me saying “Look on the upper left side of your screen. The upper left. Do you see a sort of curly symbol? Click on that to reload the page. It’s — no, no, not on the other side, your left…” “No, I don’t think we can compile those attendance stats together on zoom. That will triple the amount of time it will take. I think I need to do it here myself and research it and then send you the numbers.” “Go into your sent folder and find an old copy of our weekly listserv letter. You’ll find a link to an old event there, and then you can click on it, log in to ‘edit,’ and use the old copy as a template…. You’ll clone it. Clone. Yes, there is a button that says clone. Cee, ell, oh, en…”

“My God, the stupidity!” he exclaimed.

Of course, because I am wearing headphones, he didn’t hear the other side of the conversation, which included people patiently explaining to me, “You need administrative privileges for that, so you should delegate it to Bob. Email him immediately… No, you’re thinking of Mansur, you’ve never actually seen Bob who always works offsite.” “Okay, look, it’ll be fine. Take a moment to breathe. You didn’t save the changes, so all you have to do is back out of the website without saving and go back in…” “You didn’t preview that posting, did you? Oh God, Jinx, tell me you didn’t preview it. If you previewed it I’m going to have to rebuild the whole thing…”

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January 2nd, 2024

I was watching The Windsors last night when Michael walked into the living room and held out the phone on speaker so I could hear the announcement (In English, then Spanish, then Mandarin, then Vietnamese, then Tagalog…) that we are now legally required to shelter in place until the first week in May.

One of the volunteers at the library, Janie, called me yesterday. Janie is in her seventies, rail-thin, with iron-gray hair. She has volunteered at the library events department for a little over twenty years. She’s traveled all over the world and this country, has a lively circle of friends, and loves entertaining and exploring. Being forced to stay inside, and alone in her apartment has to be maddening for her.

“I think I have a fever,” she told me over the phone. “I keep getting hot. But I don’t have a thermometer here and they’re not to be had anywhere.”

I asked if she felt short of breath, was coughing. No and no. Had she phoned her physician? Yes. Twice. What did he say?

“He said I should make myself a martini, walk outside to the park down the street and enjoy it, while social distancing.” Pause. “He knows I love martinis.”

Hot flashes are supposed to end after menopause, but I get them, and my mother, who’s in her ’80s, still gets them. Even so, it’s scary to suddenly feel hot and sweaty in March of 2020.

Janie and I decided she’d feel better if she could use Zoom to talk to people instead of just hearing voices over the phone. I sent her a Zoom invitation for 4:00 pm, not feeling especially optimistic. Technology baffles her even more than it baffles most older people.

At 4:00, I logged onto Zoom and waited, looking at myself in the little Zoom window and noting that while the blue shirt I wore brought out my eyes, I really could use some makeup and should have brushed my hair. After a minute a window appeared, a black rectangle with Janie’s name in it.

“Can you hear me?” I asked.

Nothing. The window disappeared, then reappeared. “Look in the lower left of your window,” I said. “Click on the little microphone, then the little camera.” I resorted to pantomime, pointing down and towards the left. I had just begun to mime talking on a phone and was mouthing the words “call me” when a picture appeared and the audio kicked in. I could see the surface of Janie’s desk, one arm, her torso, the lower part of her face from the side and beyond that, the wall of pictures over her sofa.

She smiled.

We talked for about fifteen minutes, and she sounded much more like her old self, though efforts to get her to move her camera just resulted in tight close-ups of one arm and a minute or two of her being out of the frame entirely. I instructed her about sending Zoom invites to her friends and told her to call me whenever she felt like talking. “I’ll put you on the rotation” she said, laughing.

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December 23rd, 2023

Gray day. The cathedral bells just struck the noon hour. Last night I became anxious because I could not remember hearing them. We’ve lived here for over twenty years, so naturally we don’t notice the carillion, but I hated the thought of yet another pocket of silence. I listened and they rang their final hour of 9:00 pm.

More Zoom conversations yesterday afternoon. My boss’s personality is indelibly stamped with her background in theater and dance. Five years ago, on a dark rainy night, a city bus grazed her. She did a spinning pirouette and kept her footing, landing in fourth position and coming away with nothing more than a scraped and bruised elbow from hitting the side of the bus. My favorite quote, from her, during a department heads meeting years ago that got rather testy — “I’m not angry. I’m dramatic!”

She’s gotten the hang of Zoom now, so the camera came on in closeup, showing her freshly applied lipstick and the scarf she’d tied jauntily around her neck and making me conscious that I was not wearing a bra and had not brushed my hair. Our film curator was in a t-shirt and looked like he needed to trim his beard.

It was a good conversation, another little nudge out of the somnolence I mentioned the other day. The world is off balance but still spinning and we will, I pray, keep our footing. I still have a job, such as it is.

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December 20th, 2023

Morning. I sip my coffee. I look at the sun on buildings. I listen to the parrots squawking somewhere nearby.

Michael and I have been sheltering in place now for two weeks.

To keep fit, I’m running my laps around the dining room table. I’m being nudged from mental sloth by occasional emails from my co-workers. We’re all learning how to manage events online. I’ve set up a Zoom meeting at noon today with the Events Director, and our film curator and been in touch with our licensing company. (No, there’s no problem with telling our patrons, “such-and-such movie is available on Kanopy/Hoopla, etc. Watch it and we’ll meet by Zoom on Friday to discuss!”)

Strange incident yesterday with the cat. She was curled up asleep on her stand next to the window. I walked over to look out at the street and she woke into a back-arched, flat-eared, wide-eyed ball of puffed fur. Didn’t go so far as to hiss at me, but came close.

I reached out to stroke her head reassuringly and she ducked, staring at me as if I were a stranger, tail still puffed, a line of fur down her back standing up. Then she hopped off the stand and ran to her usual refuge, under the dining room table. It took her a minute to return to something close to normal, and even then she seemed doubtful (though not about Michael, whom she allowed to pet her while she kept her eyes on me.)

I left her alone for an hour and after that she was perfectly fine. No explanation for this other than that I might have awakened her from a bad dream about her feral past. Maybe it was the loose, black shirt I was wearing.

How can I blame her for being a little crazy? My own anxiety about COVID is barely kept to a simmer, bubbling up occasionally like low-grade nausea. A paperwork SNAFU has left me without health insurance until they untangle it. We checked the wrong box on a form. “You aren’t the only people who did this” the sympathetic representative told us over the phone. It will be sorted out. But until then… It’s irrational perhaps, but I’m afraid of even stepping outside.

I now think of our neighborhood markets the way I used to think of jaunts to the wine country or Point Reyes.

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December 17th, 2023

The news is bad and mad. Some conservatives, unnerved by the shut down, are calling for it to end and for elderly and other vulnerable Americans to be willing to “sacrifice yourselves” for the sake of the stock market. In spite of terrible accounts from Washington State, New York and New Jersey about overwhelmed emergency rooms and desperately overworked and unprotected medical personal, the governor of Mississippi has announced not only that he won’t call for sheltering in place, but that he will override any Mississippi mayor who tries to institute it. The president talks about packing ’em in at church on Easter.

San Francisco is a high risk area, but I have never been so glad to live in California.

Yesterday I walked out into our back garden for a few precious moments in direct sunlight. I descended four flights of back stairs, passed the waste bins (still overflowing) and walked down a short, narrow corridor to a latched door. At Michael’s insistence, I wrapped myself up with a scarf over my mouth and nose. “That corridor is an enclosed space” he pointed out. So in the corridor at least, I walked with my head modestly bowed, pressing the scarf to my face like Rebecca in the old Ivanhoe movie.

One of our downstairs neighbors has fixed the back garden up beautifully, with not only carefully tended plants but little statues of Buddhas and animals, and a couple of small metal tables and seats. I did not sit, but I walked around for bit, looked up at the sky through the lattice of branches overhead. Too small a space for running laps, but the sun felt good.

Another Zoom session last night, this time with our book group, each of the four households seen as windows on the computer screen. We didn’t talk about the book we’re planning to discuss at our next face-to-face, but we exchanged news.

All of us are over sixty. We asked how quarantined they were being, and the consensus was “very.” One of them lives on Potrero Hill, and has a view of a grassy hillside often used for walks. She said too many people were on it these days and they weren’t maintaining the proper distance. Another relayed an account of a friend in the north bay who wanted to take his wife and kid out for air on a trail that’s normally quite remote and isolated. They didn’t even stop the car. The little parking lot fronting the trail was full.

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Pam Troy

A Writer’s Website

Tag: Zoom