In a Zoom meeting you don’t want to be in? This will get you out of it

March 18, 2021 11:57 AM

You can make your connection seem spotty or take your pick of artificial distractions: baby crying, man weeping, or urination. Or a mash-up of all three. A new tool, Zoom Escaper, takes the pressure off your acting and stillness skills. Following a few simple steps, you can sabotage your own audio streams, “making your presence unbearable to others,” according to the description by the developer, Sam Lavigne. It creates fake, noisy background distractions that sound like they’re emanating from your living space. There’d be little realistic recourse on the part of your colleagues other than excusing you from the meeting to shut off the terrible din and deal with the perceived interruption.
posted by folklore724 (48 comments total)

This is great fun. (& Lavigne is always doing great things.)

Jiggering zoom inputs in linux is non-trivial and probably not worth the effort, compared to wrapping some aluminum foil around the antenna. But, I'm a fan of the concept.
posted by eotvos at 12:09 PM on March 18, 2021

Have meeting agendas and stick to them, it’s so much simpler.
posted by mhoye at 12:10 PM on March 18, 2021 [25 favorites]

Why is your connection so bad? Are you using that Zoom thingie?

No sir! I just have bad wifi.

Bullshit. You're fired.
posted by Splunge at 12:24 PM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

I'm not sure how I feel about 'baby crying' being a feature on this, unless it's meant to be a funny commentary on Zoom meetings in general. I was just chatting with a friend of mine who is a professor, and while she doesn't like meetings, she's glad she can bring her baby with her and it's not seen as a disruption.
posted by yueliang at 12:26 PM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

Thing is, it's work video calls that stink, and our IT people have to approve what I install on my work PC.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:34 PM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

There is the unsettling sound of a man weeping

Isn't that considered normal in sufficiently long meetings?
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 12:37 PM on March 18, 2021 [40 favorites]

I'm surprised "Landline ringing with spam calls" and "Lawn mower" aren't here, those are the two things always happening at my house.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:40 PM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

I want sound of men rappelling from the roof for my noise of choice. But it would only work if you could also have an inbuilt shot of their legs going up and down and banging on everything along their journey.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 12:45 PM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

I have a regular meeting at work which usually consists of me saying hi at the beginning and saying bye at the end of the hour. Actually tomorrow I have two of those scheduled. But I still have to seem like I'm paying attention only to prevent my being fired. I think claiming my connection was bad or whatever would at best mean I have to still call into it using my phone. And after that call I'd probably have to talk with IT to "fix" whatever issue I claimed to have. So instead I stare and listen to other people talk about things I'm only vaguely familiar with and don't really affect my job and wait for the hour to end while my soul dies just that little bit more.
posted by downtohisturtles at 12:47 PM on March 18, 2021 [11 favorites]

our IT people have to approve what I install on my work PC.

Just run speedtest.net over and over again to saturate your connection.
posted by bradbane at 12:53 PM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

C'mon people, it's the 2020's. Where is the deep fake generator that portrays a video of me, mildly distracted by slack, with some courtesy salutations and the occasional apology strewn in?
posted by pwnguin at 12:55 PM on March 18, 2021 [15 favorites]

The SO was just on a call with a work colleague. The woman had her two young children with her. They were being noisy. Our dog Gizmo was also present. He was barking at the noise from the kids.

Software? Who needs software. We all analog up in here. :)
posted by Splunge at 1:04 PM on March 18, 2021 [14 favorites]

You will get fired if you use this often enough. Part of remote working is making sure that your home environment can actually support remote working. Unfortunately this is now part of people's jobs. This is like the equivalent of a car sabotager so that you can tell your boss that your car failed on the way to work.
posted by benzenedream at 1:05 PM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

I mean... I have a neighbour who seems to have a circular saw schedule that aligns precisely with my meeting schedule and I just go on mute until I need to talk- that seems to be pretty standard doesn’t it?
posted by cilantro at 1:22 PM on March 18, 2021 [8 favorites]

I'd ask for a pandemic-specific chorus of sirens, fireworks, low-flying helicopters, and ice cream trucks, but I feel like actual car horns and stereos have me covered for the time being.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 1:27 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

C'mon people, it's the 2020's. Where is the deep fake generator that portrays a video of me, mildly distracted by slack, with some courtesy salutations and the occasional apology strewn in?

Last summer I read — I thought on the blue — about a guy who had made a ninety-second video loop of himself sitting in his chair listening thoughtfully which he then used as his video feed on zoom meetings when he had to be away from the screen for a moment.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:44 PM on March 18, 2021 [10 favorites]

There's a student in my kiddo's sixth grade class who got caught setting an animated gif of himself as a background in video calls so that he didn't have to be there.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:52 PM on March 18, 2021 [16 favorites]

My company has a million Teams calls daily but hardly anyone uses video (thankfully not required). My favorite bullshit-call move, that EVERYONE uses when being called to speak (when clearly their attention had been elsewhere), is: “sorry, I was having problems coming off mute.”
posted by armoir from antproof case at 1:53 PM on March 18, 2021 [10 favorites]

@DirtyOldTown , please get me that kid’s name, I want to hire him
posted by armoir from antproof case at 1:55 PM on March 18, 2021 [11 favorites]

I agree with yueliang, I loved this except for the baby crying feature - I would share with my coworkers (who are just as sick of Zoom as I am) but some have young kids and I'm sure already feel embarrassed/stressed when their kids, who are just doing what kids do, are audible during calls.
posted by rogerroger at 2:07 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

I loved this except for the baby crying feature

Thanks for a different perspective. I understood the baby crying as an example of a thing one cannot change, rather than making fun of people who have kids. But, I can see how it could be viewed differently, especially next to peeing. (I know the artist pretty well and doubt he meant it that way. But, that doesn't mean it isn't a poor choice.)
posted by eotvos at 2:31 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Part of remote working is making sure that your home environment can actually support remote working.

This is not my reality for remote working during the pandemic. None of us were set up for this prior to the pandemic and a lot of leeway is given for having less- than- perfect circumstances, especially as we have not been asked to come back in person yet.

For meetings I've been to, staying muted unless actively contributing is the norm, so I don't think any noise distractions would help me leave a meeting. They'd just be a good reason to keep my contributions brief.
posted by carrioncomfort at 3:32 PM on March 18, 2021 [11 favorites]

From the opposite end of babies crying: more than once during my Girl Scout meetings I've heard troop parents yelling at other family members, at each other, or at one of my Girl Scouts. I don't know if that happens to teachers, too, or if it's because our meetings are at a time of the week when you wouldn't expect a Zoom call to be held in the living room.
posted by The corpse in the library at 3:36 PM on March 18, 2021

Naw, I think that everyone should make a credits-roll, something like ScottH's...

Do we really need these? Because, they just happen automatically. I would also like to highly recommend; "engine revver", increasingly frequent TXT notifications and calls on another person's phone.
posted by rozcakj at 4:19 PM on March 18, 2021

Part of remote working is making sure that your home environment can actually support remote working.

I live next to a busy road which is used as a major corridor for emergency vehicles because it connects directly to the safety hospital in my city.

My work stipend unfortunately does not cover full soundproofing of my house nor a relocation to block out the once an hour siren blaring down the road. Apparently there is an increased demand for quick trips to the hospital right now.

If my company demanded this of me, or really if any company did, that'd be unreasonable, classist, and all around an extremely insensitive requirement during a historic pandemic.
posted by paimapi at 4:23 PM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

The point of the "can actually support remote working" comment was that eventually the pandemic will end enough for people to go back into the office. And if you have spent months pretending there is something like an open pit gold mine right outside your window in order to get out of work calls, your boss is going to make you come in the first day it's safe enough to do so. But, if in reality, things are quiet and whatnot, maybe you can WFH indefinitely.
posted by sideshow at 4:27 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Have meeting agendas and stick to them, it’s so much simpler.

This made me chuckle.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 5:02 PM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

Terrible background noise is kind of par for the course in the Zoom world I've been living in. When it starts the moderator just mutes everyone so this kind of thing wouldn't get you very far.
posted by Patapsco Mike at 5:39 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

a good way to be unwelcome in group calls is to simply own a bird, I have found, as a non-bird-owner
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:43 PM on March 18, 2021 [15 favorites]

The most frequent unmuted-background-noise issues in my experience are people who have their mics directly in the path of their exhaling nostrils, and people using a laptop with no external mic pounding away on their keyboards. I can't decide if FWOOOOOOOOMMMFFF ... FWOOOOOOOOMMMFFF ... or BAMITTY-THUMPITY-BAM-BAM-BANGITTY-THUMPITTY-THUMPPA-THUMP is worse.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:00 PM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

Oh, and also incessantly barking dogs. Yep, that's worst.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:00 PM on March 18, 2021

downtohisturtles, you can use a video for a virtual background in Zoom. So you can video yourself paying attention, make it a loop, and swap it out after you've said hello until right when you're supposed to say goodbye. The transitions are a little tricky (easier if you can pretend to have a shaky video connection so you can swap in the video background) and you have to wear the same thing as the you in the video, but you can buy a chunk of time if it works. You should probably not do this. Maybe ask if you're allowed to knit while you're listening.
posted by blnkfrnk at 6:23 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

BAMITTY-THUMPITY-BAM-BAM-BANGITTY-THUMPITTY-THUMPPA-THUMP

OMG, someone on our team does this. taking notes as others are talking. Why. Is. Your. mic. Not. Muted???
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:52 PM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

I don't know if that happens to teachers, too, or if it's because our meetings are at a time of the week when you wouldn't expect a Zoom call to be held in the living room.

I know several of my teacher friends are dealing with various levels of upset/trauma from having witnessed various kinds and degrees of abuse of their students on video calls. It's a window into some kids' shitty home lives.
posted by Dysk at 12:19 AM on March 19, 2021 [6 favorites]

Way back in the 80s I worked for a little company in Alexandria, VA. The parking options were: 1) a space in the lot that you paid for, none were ever available in my time there, 2) a space on the street where you could stay all day, there were maybe 10 or 12 of those, so hard to get, and 3) 2-hour and 3-hour spaces. So my office had this culture of letting people go move their cars as needed. Which meant, you could very often get out of any meeting or a really boring conversation by suddenly looking startled, glancing at your watch, and saying, sorry gotta go move my car! It was great.
posted by JanetLand at 6:00 AM on March 19, 2021 [11 favorites]

a good way to be unwelcome in group calls is to simply own a bird, I have found, as a non-bird-owner

One day, my partner brought one of our parrots out to hang with him while we had our couples therapy appointment. Now the bird, normally quite sedate, kicks up a big fuss every week during therapy until my partner brings him out to quiet him. The bird, a cherry-head conure, sits comfortably on my partner's shoulder and grooms his beard while we talk.

Our therapist once did our appointment with a sick chicken in her arms. (The chicken is fine.)
posted by Orlop at 7:27 AM on March 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

Several of my daughter's friends took screen caps of her in class one day and then all set that as their Zoom background and ducked out of the picture. The class was then composed of A) many bored students, B) about a quarter of the room was images of my daughter looking vaguely contemplative, and C) one panel of her actively looking confused. Sometime Zoom can be fun.

Also, for transitions just flip off your camera for a moment.
posted by Cris E at 7:42 AM on March 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

I'd like to green screen the window behind me, with a "live" view out the window, and then have a War of The Worlds alien attack take place.
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:59 AM on March 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

A couple weeks ago, my Macbook crashed HARD during a morning status meeting. Like, so hard that when it restarted, the video camera stopped showing up in the list of attached peripherals, so Zoom would yell at me when I tried to get into video calls, because there was no video input to use.

As with most tech support problems, the solution was "turn it off and turn it back on again," but I, uh, did not rush to find that solution. In fact I'm now trying to recreate the exact combination of things that caused the problem in the first place, because when you join video calls with just audio, you can actually get work done while everyone else rambles on. Tech support during quarantine is nonexistent, so all I need is a shell script I can run that makes the camera report some kind of scary-sounding error that I can fix whenever I absolutely have to.
posted by Mayor West at 8:40 AM on March 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

I don't know if that happens to teachers, too, or if it's because our meetings are at a time of the week when you wouldn't expect a Zoom call to be held in the living room.

I've recently been involved in some science education outreach work that involves sitting in on virtual classrooms in a public elementary school in a place where many families are struggling. . . and it's heartbreaking. I suspect if you saw video of my home when I was 6 it would be equally disturbing, if in slightly different ways. But, the distractions kids have to deal with when trying to watch a fun, six-minute video about giraffes are overwhelming. As a grown adult who has expensive sound blocking headphones and the confidence to tell people around me to shut up, I couldn't possibly get anything done in some of those rooms.

The kid whose sister launched in impromptu pillow-fight in the middle of class was having the most fun. Usually, it's yelling, angry parents and big, loud events in the kitchen where the school computer is located. Sometimes the parents are yelling into the phone rather than at each other or the kids, and they probably have good reasons to yell. But, it sure makes it hard to learn about giraffes. (There are lots of kind, engaged parents working hard to make things good for their kids too. But, you notice them less.) The work that K-12 teachers do is amazing, even more so now. And, I'm very grateful for the thoughtful spouse I have and the money we can spend to solve problems.
posted by eotvos at 10:42 AM on March 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

I have a reasonably good setup at home (office is a small room in the basement, a few windows, and I don't share the space - wife and kid have their own separate work/school areas). It is USUALLY ok for meetings.

Except that the computer my kid uses for Minecraft is directly behind me, and when he's done with school and wants to hop on a server to play with friends, he keeps forgetting that the audio is problematic. The headphones he has plugged into the phone he uses for Discord chat might keep me from hearing his friends - but it does NOT keep me from hearing his game audio. Nothing like unmuting to speak up in a meeting just in time to catch an Enderman death scream in the background.
posted by caution live frogs at 12:44 PM on March 19, 2021

C'mon people, it's the 2020's. Where is the deep fake generator that portrays a video of me, mildly distracted by slack, with some courtesy salutations and the occasional apology strewn in?

Here you go.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 1:26 PM on March 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

I'm actually surprised that a physical mute button is not a thing you can buy. I would pay a solid $20-30 for a button that plugs in with USB, lets me tap to toggle the mute, and lights up when I'm "on air." Hiding the button in a different place in the five different programs I've had to use for work (Hangouts, Zoom, WebEx, Skype, Teams) is unhelpful, to say the least. And I'm pretty good about muting myself. No, I don't want to build it myself.
posted by blnkfrnk at 6:26 PM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

Speaking of actual things that happen during zoom calls. I posted this above:

I want sound of men rappelling from the roof for my noise of choice. But it would only work if you could also have an inbuilt shot of their legs going up and down and banging on everything along their journey.

This is an actual thing that happened all through the first day of classes in September. Eventually I just turned the laptop to the window and we all enjoyed the sights and sounds as a group for 15 minutes.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 9:56 PM on March 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

I want sound of men rappelling from the roof for my noise of choice.

I've always wanted to stage little performance pieces for the window-washers as they pass by. Coordinating with the people directly above and below to make a coherent series would be even more fun.
posted by eotvos at 1:30 PM on March 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

Based on a very limited sample size I would suggest not providing a distraction for window washers. The ones I saw did not seem terribly comfortable in their harnesses as it was, and as our windows are old and not double glazed I did have some worries about them ending up in my apartment.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 7:22 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

But generally I don't understand the expectation of no surrounding sounds on a zoom call. It is not like my regular meetings and classes are not interrupted by loud noises.

It is also hard to compete with someone running into a large myth class dressed as Dionysus and crying out 'i am the god of wine and madness! Where are the maenads' and then rushing out as a distraction. Or a marching band. Or drilling giant holes around campus just for laughs during class periods. So I figure we just embrace a bit of that if it happens around us.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 7:27 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

Fair point, lesbiassparrow. Though, I originally read that as a "math class," which is less likely but intriguing.

My classes as a student always involved closing the windows at noon to avoid the bell-tower music class performance. (I love the Amélie credits song. It's fun to hear on bells once or twice. The twentieth time, it becomes tedious.)
posted by eotvos at 10:47 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]