'Owners of a farm in Lancashire, England, said that they had earned as much as $50,000 by booking goats as guests for Zoom calls, including Lisa, who specializes in “passive-aggressive bleating.” ' Harper's Weekly Review, Feb. 1, 2021
In the new regime of virus sequestration and remote work, with the attendant loneliness and isolation, the Zoom meeting seems the sole podium remaining for the lone voice crying in a wilderness of neglected laundry, pet hair, badly-worn slippers, unopened mail, empty vodka bottles, a drift of weekly shoppers' guides strewn across undusted tables, yesterday's bowl of soggy cornflakes - the general wrack of lives edging toward the abyss.
One might anticipate in the circumstances that Zoom would provide an ideal soapbox for the lonely loggorhetic bore, precisely the sort who even in first-person encounters mostly fails to perceive gentle cues like fidgeting, glazed eyes, yawns, glances at watches, flatulence, lint-picking and other such signs that it's time to sit down. Apropos is a tale a friend tells me of a young fellow of his acquaintance whose father pulled some strings to get him employment with reasonable pay. Came the epidemic and the ascendance of Zoom, and in meeting after meeting a fellow Zoomer inevitably held the (virtual) floor, droning interminably about his personal situation, his "issues," his hopes and dreams. At some point early-ish in the young man's career trajectory he lost patience and launched himself into an obscenity-filled rant. The ensuing silence in the Zoomfest was his cue that he had failed to hit the mute on his laptop. I understand he is in search of an alternative career path, though one can only sympathize with his pique and his momentary lapse from the passive to the aggressive.
A second attendant difficulty with zoom meetings, aside from the incidence of masturbating under the desk or Zooming naked, is the tendency to zoom in bathrobe and pajamas. My grandson's middle school guidance counselor was constrained to call the lad's parents and let them know that the young on-line scholar was attending classes while supine amongst rumpled bedclothes like an adolescent Hugh Hefner.
As I have no business to conduct, I have only attended Zoom meetings with family members (friends don't Zoom friends). Most of the preliminaries involve trying to 1) get an audio connection, 2) get a video connection, 3) get both signals simultaneously, 4) ascertaining who isn't present, 5) ascertaining whether those absent might eventually be present or why they can't be, 6) ascertaining why someone .of the party has a glare in their video feed, 7) someone explaining that they have just had to reboot their connection and could the aforegoing several minutes be repeated.
If the pandemic radically alters the notion of a workplace, if such platforms as Zoom become the usual forum for the conduct of the world's business, then why not, after all? Entropy is the law for the ages and the world seems to be slipping no less smoothly into the abyss even in the absence of face-to-face transactions. I foresee a rosy future in which entire military operations are transacted exclusively over Zoom, like a "World of Warcraft" for Proud Boys and other really serious adults.
The goats-who-Zoom are on hire as an antidote to "Zoom fatigue," the Python-esque syndrome for the modern age which includes such symptoms as boredom, lowered morale, loss of good humor (see above) - the "existential alienation" of the 1950s repackaged for the digital age. And there are other domesticated beasts at least as photogenic and vocally endowed by their Creator as is the goat. Someone innured to a caprine charm may respond more promptly and favorably to the bovine, or to the jackass, the burro, or any member of class Ungulata.
An entire presidency has been conducted over a Twitter feed; where were these goats when we really needed them?
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