Can we go back to the beginning?

January 3, 2014 8:11 AM

ConferenceCall.biz: a slice of ambient corporate hell.
posted by rollick (92 comments total)

Woah, almost had a panic attack. Perfect reminder of why I quit my desk job.
posted by pwally at 8:17 AM on January 3, 2014 [4 favorites]

oh god
posted by rebent at 8:17 AM on January 3, 2014 [5 favorites]

You know how whenever there is a thread about spiders there is always an early comment that just says "no" over and over again?

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO
posted by bondcliff at 8:18 AM on January 3, 2014 [20 favorites]

This was a decidedly creepy and accurate slice of every Monday - all day - for me and at least half of Friday.

I was mesmerized. Took me a while to realize that the audio and the images loop differently.
posted by Thistledown at 8:20 AM on January 3, 2014

This is brilliant.
posted by jquinby at 8:22 AM on January 3, 2014

Audio is way too good. I'd love to have a conference call system that sounded that nice. To be authentic it needs to have a liberal sprinkling of shitty-cellphone-connection background noise, screaming children, barking dogs, toilets flushing, horrible feedback, heavy breathing, and people who think they're on mute but aren't.

Though I do think I'm going to start playing depressing background music on all my calls, preferably at some sort of subliminal level. Maybe when they start to run up on 5 minutes over time or something.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:22 AM on January 3, 2014 [20 favorites]

I mean, there's even a dog barking in the background every so often. It's perfect.
posted by jquinby at 8:28 AM on January 3, 2014

They left out when three people try to talk at once (generally due to someone asking, "Who is on the call now?") completely blanking out the audio.

Also, just by instinct, on hearing the voices, I immediately started tuning out and working on email instead.
posted by mittens at 8:29 AM on January 3, 2014 [12 favorites]

Who joined please?
posted by whuppy at 8:29 AM on January 3, 2014 [10 favorites]

If everyone could please....I need everyone to mute. Please.
posted by jquinby at 8:31 AM on January 3, 2014 [5 favorites]

20 minutes into the call...

Senior VP: Hi guys, sorry I'm late, let's start from the top.
Everyone: *audible eyerolling*
posted by arcticseal at 8:32 AM on January 3, 2014 [10 favorites]

Could we take this discussion offline?
posted by zombieflanders at 8:34 AM on January 3, 2014 [3 favorites]

How can something so horrible because it is so accurate but so beautiful at the same time?
posted by MCMikeNamara at 8:35 AM on January 3, 2014 [8 favorites]

This is fantastic. It's incredibly close to perfection, except, as some people have mentioned, that the sound quality is a bit too good.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 8:35 AM on January 3, 2014

(rustling noises) HAS JOINED, THE CONFERENCE.

(rustling noises) HAS LEFT, THE CONFERENCE.
posted by theodolite at 8:35 AM on January 3, 2014 [39 favorites]

Sorry, sorry, I was on mute.....um....can you repeat the question?
posted by xingcat at 8:35 AM on January 3, 2014 [5 favorites]

I guess we'll have to plan the plan on this one.

[goes off to live in hermitage in the mountains forever]
posted by echo target at 8:39 AM on January 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

Needs more echo. Echo. echo.
posted by achrise at 8:41 AM on January 3, 2014 [3 favorites]

I was on mute.....um....can you repeat the question?

For years I've thought that a good little digital-circuits project would be a box that goes between your telephone handset and base, and contains a little rolling 10s digital audio buffer, and then a button on top that, when pressed, replays the buffer through the handset.

The use case is for when you hear someone say your name on a call, but of course have no idea what they're asking because you haven't been paying attention for the last 45 minutes because you have other things to do.

In that case, you pretend to be on mute for 10 seconds while hitting the button and replaying the buffer, hearing the question again, and nobody is the wiser. (Really: everyone knows, but nobody says anything because they're doing the same damn thing on their end.)

I guess these days you'd really want it to be a smartphone app rather than a physical device. (When I first had this idea it was going to be a tape loop...)
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:42 AM on January 3, 2014 [15 favorites]

My favorite con-call story is the time that I was lurking on a bridge that had been set up for some ongoing crisis. My team had no direct involvement, but I was somehow still getting hit up by passing folks for updates, so I stayed on the bridge sort of half-listening.

At one point I started the Pac Man app on my google homepage. Guess who wasn't muted? Suddenly I hear our director, who was in the thick of the crisis.

"Is somebody actually playing PAC Man right now?"

I quietly hung up, muted the game and rejoined. It was the perfect crime.
posted by jquinby at 8:43 AM on January 3, 2014 [29 favorites]

They left out when my asshole boss interrupts everyone, including our clients.
posted by Mister_A at 8:49 AM on January 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

> a little rolling 10s digital audio buffer, and then a button on top that, when pressed, replays the buffer through the handset.

The ideal solution for me would be automatic transcription scrolling in a chat window udring the call, but there's no way that would be feasible at conference call quality. Unless maybe the transcription was done on the phone/headset side, but then people wouldn't be able to call in from cell phones (maybe smart phones?).
posted by postcommunism at 8:53 AM on January 3, 2014

*twitch*

Wow, that took me back. I still occasionally have to join a conference call, but they're mercifully short usually. Nothing like the mandatory, weekly two hour status calls I used to have to do. Quite often for two or three projects each week. Argh.
posted by Happy Dave at 8:54 AM on January 3, 2014

It's funny because its true!
posted by BrodieShadeTree at 8:56 AM on January 3, 2014

The worst one they didn't include is someone talking on their cellphone from somewhere that sounds like a high speed wind tunnel.
posted by burnmp3s at 8:58 AM on January 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

On one of my calls, someone has hold music that sounds exactly like an ice-cream truck. When they put us on hold in the middle of a conversation, it's annoying but also strangely nostalgic.
posted by mittens at 8:59 AM on January 3, 2014

"[principal decision maker] couldn't make the meeting so I've been asked to collect your notes and take some screens. For now let's go ahead with the presentation. We'll schedule a followup share next week when [PDM] is available and we can have a quick rundown and you can answer their questions."
posted by ardgedee at 9:00 AM on January 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

thanks everyone let's take a bio-break now
posted by mullacc at 9:02 AM on January 3, 2014 [7 favorites]

Can someone just send me the deck?
posted by bleep at 9:06 AM on January 3, 2014 [9 favorites]

Back in the early 00s, every conference call I was on was plagued by electronic noise courtesy of someone's Blackberry checking for mail. Every single one.
posted by tommasz at 9:10 AM on January 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

I am going to play this on my next conference call and see if anyone figures it out.
posted by Chuffy at 9:14 AM on January 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN
posted by duffell at 9:18 AM on January 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

You ain't conference-called until you've done the West Coast-East Coast-UK-EU-Singapore-Oz weekly call. Time zones make it a living hell, which fairness dictates is rotated so that everyone gets a go in the zombie slots. It's actually a lot like a seance, both in ambience and effectiveness, and that's on top of all the joys mentioned upthread.

Oh, incomprehensible accents. Have we done those yet?
posted by Devonian at 9:19 AM on January 3, 2014 [5 favorites]

I think this has been posted before, but I've found this to be a sanity-saver on some calls:

Conference Call Bingo

Works best when your coworkers are playing as well.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:20 AM on January 3, 2014 [7 favorites]

For all of the early to late 20th century Sci-Fi which used telepresence as a technological signifier of "the future", was there any that ever actually captured how crapulent and irritating it often is in practice?

I mean, I'm with people who use Skype every week of their lives (bare minimum) but there's still a five minute conversation for every meeting about how to effectively maintain a group call.
posted by codacorolla at 9:26 AM on January 3, 2014

Google Hangouts, guys. It's life-changing.
posted by nev at 9:27 AM on January 3, 2014 [4 favorites]

There was a great commercial a few years back where a maintenance guy walks into a full conference room and announces: "I've come to fix the mute button". (I have no idea what the commercial was for.)
posted by monotreme at 9:31 AM on January 3, 2014

Ready check, on the tanks. Let's not wipe this time.
posted by kmz at 9:32 AM on January 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

Remember, stay out of the boss's AOEs. Red circles are not healing circles.

(Wait, wrong conference call type?)
posted by kmz at 9:33 AM on January 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

These little windows into that universe are always a refreshing reminder to me that, no, I am not wasting my life.
posted by cmoj at 9:40 AM on January 3, 2014

Needs more echo. Echo. echo.

Yes, and missing that one manager down the hall who puts the conference on speaker at max volume and reminds everyone else on the line "who is echoing" (ie. on the same floor as he is) to please mute. And he's using a crappy voice activated microphone which cuts off the first syllable whenever he starts talking.
posted by ceribus peribus at 9:41 AM on January 3, 2014

This is bringing terrible memories back of Sprint. My entire day was one conference call after another, typically 3-4 hours a day. Sometimes they would overlap. During code deployments I would be on a 12 hour bridge with people I didn't know, trying to crank out service tickets for bugs and keep my sanity. During one project we did all of our testing over conference calls, which meant having about 30 people on at once. I would trigger a test and then wait as the test signal went through Sprint's Human Centipede of API calls, most of the individual ones only one person or department had any access to. Which meant every step of every test order needed to be verified, and I had to track all of this. These would take up my entire day.

Now I work for a company where the developers are in the same building and down the hall. Much better.
posted by hellojed at 9:47 AM on January 3, 2014 [4 favorites]

To be authentic it needs to have a liberal sprinkling of shitty-cellphone-connection background noise, screaming children, barking dogs, toilets flushing, horrible feedback, heavy breathing, and people who think they're on mute but aren't.

It covers at least half of those. You didn't listen for very long.
posted by dmd at 9:50 AM on January 3, 2014

MCMikeNamara: How can something so horrible because it is so accurate but so beautiful at the same time?

Because you're not really experiencing it, so you can look in as a voyeur and grin at the misery of others. You know you can leave at any time, without repercussions.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:53 AM on January 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

You know you can leave at any time

As can we all. You just have to know the magical phrase, "I have a hard stop in the next 2 minutes."
posted by mittens at 9:54 AM on January 3, 2014 [13 favorites]

There's also the two people gossiping in the corridor in French, and the guy eating a packet of crisps.
posted by arcticseal at 9:57 AM on January 3, 2014

Just now getting into some serious looping synchronicity. This is pretty much awesome[ly eerie].
posted by Fezboy! at 10:08 AM on January 3, 2014

postcommunism: "> a little rolling 10s digital audio buffer, and then a button on top that, when pressed, replays the buffer through the handset.

The ideal solution for me would be automatic transcription scrolling in a chat window udring the call, but there's no way that would be feasible at conference call quality. Unless maybe the transcription was done on the phone/headset side, but then people wouldn't be able to call in from cell phones (maybe smart phones?)."

THis is what IM is for. I can't tell you the great conversations I have had on IM with another call participant during a conference call.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:08 AM on January 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

duffell: "ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN ICE PICK IN BRAIN"

If you're weighing the pros and cons of ice picks in brains, Trotsky probably didn't have to take a lot of conference calls.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:28 AM on January 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

Oh my god this would be so much funnier if it wasn't quite so true to life.

sob

posted by RedOrGreen at 10:29 AM on January 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

Google Hangouts, guys. It's life-changing.

Serious question -- how so? What does it give you?
posted by A Terrible Llama at 10:33 AM on January 3, 2014

Back in the late 90s when I worked at a small software company, we had a conference call with some east coast clients that started at something like 8 AM or 9 AM their time. We were in Colorado, two hours behind.

Fortunately, my boss was the accommodating sort who knew what I was like that early in the morning, so I got permission to call in from home. Come the day, I got up, staggered to my phone, and dialed up the conference call. As the call wore on, it became increasingly apparent that there was no reason on Earth for me to actually be on the call--there were no code-monkey-level decisions being made or questions being asked. However, I couldn't just drop off, either...

...so I spent the entire rest of the call playing EverQuest in my underwear. It was synergy. Or something.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 10:37 AM on January 3, 2014

Serious question -- how so? What does it give you?

For me all it gave me was a bunch of people confusing my work google account with my personal google account, never sending invites to the right one, and then the entire office ragequitting it en masse.
posted by Think_Long at 10:38 AM on January 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

Serious question -- how so? What does it give you?

Apart from damn simple video conferencing on a service that most people have, the biggest might be that it identifies exactly who is speaking by showing a little sound meter next to each portrait. Combined with instant messaging, it means that you can identify who's responsible for cross-talk and ambient noise, and nip it in the bud without interfering with an ongoing conversation.
posted by zombieflanders at 10:41 AM on January 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

Google Hangouts is pretty cool. Man, I hate Skype, but everyone seems to want to use it...
posted by KokuRyu at 10:45 AM on January 3, 2014

> Also, just by instinct, on hearing the voices, I immediately started tuning out and working on email instead.

I loved con calls. That was my metafilter time.
posted by jfuller at 10:51 AM on January 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

We're a big and old company and video conferencing hasn't really taken off. The technology is there, but there is some awkwardness about it, I guess. Some of us have never seen each other in person.

I also might be too old for video conferencing.

Also, doesn't it make it painfully obvious when people are doing other things when on the call?

Actually, now that I consider it, that might be why it hasn't taken off. We're on conference calls constantly. The only way to get anything done is to work straight through them.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 10:55 AM on January 3, 2014

Some people think that selling bowling balls in Ohio sounds painful. Dear god it's so much better than what I used to do.
posted by slogger at 11:03 AM on January 3, 2014

>>Serious question -- how so? What does [Google Hangouts] give you?

>Apart from damn simple video conferencing on a service that most people have, the biggest might be that it identifies exactly who is speaking by showing a little sound meter next to each portrait.[...]

Yeah, ok, I've stayed away from Hangouts (trying not to mix home and work email addresses) but I am forced to use WebEx and GoToMeeting as well as Skype, and that is a useful feature. Also, being the moderator allows you to preemptively cut someone's mic, which is a small mercy.

But video conferencing is just ... awful. I have no interest in watching you pick your nose or browse the web, thank you. ("My laptop lid is closed, so I can't use my camera.")
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:09 AM on January 3, 2014

The worst was during the Great Volcano Stranding of 2010 which caught our CEO in Europe while our VP was at a conference in Asia. Daily conference calls over a 13h time difference are bad enough but the horror is magnified when the party who has insisted the calls be made has a habit of falling asleep mid-call and snoring loudly.
posted by elizardbits at 11:12 AM on January 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

My company makes a conferencing product as an adjunct to another and it's actually pretty handy. We use it a lot.

TONS of our customers are asking us to implement video, but whenever I start probing them about it…none of them actually WANT it, except for the CEO and a few Lumbergh-like mid-level VPs.
posted by Thistledown at 11:15 AM on January 3, 2014

Great Volcano Stranding of 2010

That was preferable to our old CEO who apparently couldn't do business on TC/VC and chartered a jet at great expense to fly him the long way round for a meeting. Just another in the long line of great decisions from which my company is only now recovering.
posted by arcticseal at 11:30 AM on January 3, 2014

Does it cover two different groups of people on crap speaker phones (there is no other kind) trying to understand each other?

A favorite of mine was the Israeli service I used for a while, where there were essentially pre-defined conference rooms. Call in too early (or even on time, if the last meeting went too long) and there would be another meeting going on. For some reason their 800 number lines couldn't decode DTMF worth a damn either, so you'd enter your code three or four times, wait five minutes for an operator, who would then take five minutes to work out which call to attach to.
posted by wotsac at 11:38 AM on January 3, 2014

Hi, did everyone get the attachment I sent with the original invite?
OK, I'll forward it again.
OK, does everyone have it now?
posted by Ratio at 11:53 AM on January 3, 2014 [6 favorites]

Hey, sorry I am late, I was putting out some fires in accounts payable. Can someone summarize what's been said so far for me?
posted by rmless at 11:57 AM on January 3, 2014

These calls are going entirely too well--where is the feedback? the ambulance sirens or roadwork outside? the crying children? the coffee slurping? the texting making "boop boop" noises?

I'm breaking out in hives just remembering a previous job. I was responsible for wrangling conference calls for committees composed of very senior doctors, 2-3 time zones and occasionally continents apart. My favorite meeting involved three surgeons, one of whom was in a hospital hallway supervising a nurse who was preparing patients for surgery. He was muted most of the time, but occasionally would unmute to chime in, and we would hear squeaking wheels, chewing and crinkling, "mumble cc's of mumblemumble", and the footsteps of people sprinting by. My second favorite meeting took place quarterly at midnight my time, early morning European time, and involved four very quiet oncologists with English, German, and French accents. They were not awake, I was not awake, and I had to lead them through a report and secure recommendations. They were very nice and probably tired of saying "no comments, this is fine", though I was delirious and still enjoyed hearing it said so charmingly.
posted by esoterrica at 12:06 PM on January 3, 2014

My favorite conference call recently was one where I called into a client (IT guy at a health center) meeting and an unfamiliar-sounding voice said "hi!" It was clearly not my client or any of my co-workers. But could it be one of the client's co-workers? Perhaps it was someone I'd met before and forgotten, so I decided to play it cool and ask everyone to introduce themselves. My sysadmin introduces himself, the client introduces himself, I introduce myself. It gets to the mystery guys and he's like "Hi, I'm Steve, I'm a medical doctor, I guess I'm in the wrong meeting. I'll leave now." And then he hung up.
posted by melissam at 12:07 PM on January 3, 2014

And I thought moving to the "cloud" would help solve the problem of "Are we all looking at the same draft? The file name should be blah blah blah."

Instead now I get "Hey Melissa, I forgot my login again, can you reset it?"

Nowadays if they've asked that more than five times, I reset it to something like M@gicCutieP1eP0nyCuteK1tt3ns.
posted by melissam at 12:12 PM on January 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

I guess it's because most of my friends and family don't have jobs with calls like this, so I don't have anyone else in my life to whom to vent about things like this, and I don't know if it's "misery loves company" or what, but there's something about seeing so many familiar examples in this thread that is honestly very comforting.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 12:14 PM on January 3, 2014 [4 favorites]

Hi, did everyone get the attachment?

I swear I'm going to bitchslap someone through the phone one of these days.

The amount of times you send the attachment, point out the attachment in the email, attach it to the meeting request, resend it the day before the call in case they missed it and they STILL say "There was an attachment?".
posted by arcticseal at 12:31 PM on January 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

Also missing the one guy who has a klakety keyboard near their mic.
posted by furtive at 12:47 PM on January 3, 2014 [3 favorites]

My favorite is when someone spends 10 goddamn minutes figuring out how to share their desktop view, and then no one in the meeting even uses the computer.
posted by Think_Long at 12:50 PM on January 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

OMG, if you want it to sound absolutely real, open it in two tabs at once.
posted by jquinby at 12:51 PM on January 3, 2014 [5 favorites]

Also missing the one guy who has a klakety keyboard near their mic.
--furtive

That's me! Just thought you'd like to know.
I loves me my buckle-spring keyboards
posted by Fezboy! at 12:55 PM on January 3, 2014

Wait, how come the music matches, no matter how many you open?
posted by mittens at 12:55 PM on January 3, 2014

How about the guy who keeps sliding his mic around on his desk so everyone else on the call gets an ear shattering KHCHCHCHCHCHKKCHKHKHCHHSSHK! That guy was always my favorite

Also missing the one guy who has a klakety keyboard near their mic.

Ooh yeah, that guy, screw that guy

Google Hangouts has a nice feature where it automates you if you start typing. They haven't quite solved the echo problem but if everyone wears headphones it's by far the best videoconference software I've used.

I used to think video was pointless but lately I find it preferable to voice-only conference calls; people tend to act more like human beings to one another when they're not just disembodied voices. And you can tell when people have zoned out.
posted by ook at 12:55 PM on January 3, 2014

Humans are not really made for cooperation.
posted by dhoe at 12:55 PM on January 3, 2014 [5 favorites]

Kadin2048: "I've thought that a good little digital-circuits project would be a box that goes between your telephone handset and base, and contains a little rolling 10s digital audio buffer, and then a button on top that, when pressed, replays the buffer through the handset"

They have this feature in some audio panels for aircraft in case the pilot misses something from air traffic control: dedicated Replay button provides a “say again” function that repeats previous ATC communications
posted by exogenous at 12:56 PM on January 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

The only thing worse than sitting through these things is when the guy in the next cube insists on putting his lousy call on speaker. Sore neck? Get a headset, jerkface!
posted by the christopher hundreds at 12:57 PM on January 3, 2014

My new company has videoconferencing, but not on any meeting I set up. I have so far escaped learning how to use the system and just stick to call-in numbers, and you know, that's fine. I still have to attend occasional videoconference meetings, and I have no idea why we need it. The audio isn't any better and a video image doesn't help me understand their question.

Also, I find the robotic cameras deeply creeply; if you speak, they perk up and swivel toward you, and put an enlarged image of you on screen. GAH no, I guess I'll just not talk at all.
posted by emjaybee at 12:57 PM on January 3, 2014

Google Hangouts has a nice feature where it automates you if you start typing.

So that's what G+ stands for!
posted by arcticseal at 1:09 PM on January 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

if you speak, they perk up and swivel toward you, and put an enlarged image of you on screen

Oh no no no. That image would basically be this.
posted by elizardbits at 1:11 PM on January 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

Humans are not really made for cooperation.

Yes.
posted by anothermug at 1:47 PM on January 3, 2014

So that's what G+ stands for!

I could have sworn I had unautocorrected that autocorrection of automute autoarrrgh
posted by ook at 2:07 PM on January 3, 2014

The "WELCOME TO GLOBALMEET. PLEASE ENTER YOUR PASSCODE" prompt that's always the loudest part of the call by far -- somewhere between Dora and Billy Mays
posted by kurumi at 2:13 PM on January 3, 2014

Woah, almost had a panic attack. Perfect reminder of why I quit my desk job.

Me too, and I didn't even click on the link. (shudder)
posted by Wordwoman at 2:34 PM on January 3, 2014

Terrible as it may be, I'm bookmarking this link to have running when I want to have a bit of internet time. Slap an "In a call" post-it on the office door, turn the speakers up and Bob's your facilitator.
posted by arcticseal at 3:16 PM on January 3, 2014 [5 favorites]

This may have been shared before, it still cracks me up: David Grady: The Conference Call (SLYT).
posted by FreelanceBureaucrat at 5:20 PM on January 3, 2014

Sometimes I think it would be worth setting up a call recorder just so I could put together a mixtape of conference-call hold music.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:45 AM on January 4, 2014

I'm late to reply, but:

Why Google Hangouts are the best solution for remote, multi-person communication:

* You can use normal human cues to figure out who's speaking, or who wants to speak. People can raise their hands! I realize this is true of any video system, but it's important.

* A Hangout is just a URL. If you want someone to join the Hangout, you send them a URL, not a toll-free number, a local number, an international number, a bridge number, and a passcode.

* It's integrated such that with Google Calendar, you can just click 'add a video link' to the calendar invite itself, and then you literally have to do nothing to tell people how to join the meeting. (This only works if everyone uses Google Calendar, which is true at my job.)

* Screensharing is one click and just works.

* There is no moderator, so you don't have to wait for the 'leader' to join to start the call.

* Integrated chat window also just works, great for tossing in URLs or snarky commentary.

* Anyone can mute anyone, so if someone's got a car alarm going off in the background, you can just shut that down instantly. Also good for rage-muting someone.

* The video filters and effects are goofy, but if people use them sparingly they're fun and break up the monotony of endless meetings. If the company is distributed, humor is even harder to come by and therefore more important to team cohesion. Also, the B/W filter is awesome.

I was initially a video call hater too, but now every time I have to join an external conference call I feel like I've asked to fax something.
posted by nev at 2:54 PM on January 4, 2014 [2 favorites]

I don't get any sound. Is there a trick to getting it to start? I click join and then it just weird video.
posted by dios at 8:47 AM on January 6, 2014

I didn't get the WebEx for this...
posted by JoeXIII007 at 9:55 AM on January 6, 2014