#AnkerWork
I was in a crucial meeting when my internet went down. I had to restart my router, reboot my laptop, and finally came back online 5 minutes later. It felt like a lifetime!
What’s Your Biggest Work From Home Fail? (Contest!)
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Mine involved my dog. Being part Husky he has a habit of going into full wolf howl when a fire or police siren is heard anywhere within about a 2 mile radius of my house. Most times I am on mute so its no big deal but this time I was presenting when he went into full on howl mode for a least a full minute. I muted but the others had the pleasure of watching me wait for the howl to subside. Once it subsided, to add insult to injury one of the members of my team decided to see if he could replicate the effect by howling himself. As I am sure you can guess it was a big success but this time they didnt want me to mute so they could enjoy the fun. From that time they still talk about the howling good time they had.
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Twitter post
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While discussing the possibility of a three person phone conference, I told my x wife that I do three ways all the time with two of my female neighbors. Realizing what I just told her, I said maybe I should rephrase that.
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We were split into groups in one of my courses (grad school). Each instructor is assigned to a small group to facilitate discussion, answer questions, etc. Our newly-assigned instructor apparently thought she had muted herself, because after our discussion began, we watched as she turned to her colleague in the room with her and said, loud and clear to us all, “This group is so sh***y compared to my previous one.” Her colleague then agreed: “Yeah you got a lot of the slow ones.” Keep in mind this is a graduate-level class on immunology. We all basically sat in stunned silence at this, at which point she assumed we had run out of things to talk about and moved on to the next discussion topic.
Later that day, someone apparently informed her of what had happened, and she sent out a very non-apology email that had a few gems like these:
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“It has come to my attention that some of you overheard a private conversation between myself and another instructor.”
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“We all make mistakes, and we’re all here to grow and learn together.”
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“I would ask for the same patience and understanding as we strive to show you all as our students.”
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I joined a 2021 Sales Kickoff call with ~500 of my colleagues. People were connecting from across the globe and getting settled for the first of four days of back-to-back meetings.
Within a few seconds of joining, I had 3 people message me to say that they could hear me singing Trans Siberian Orchestra, and I might want to mute my line. Turns out we had not been muted by default. Yes, it is possible to be embarrassed for 8 hours.
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I was hired during the early stages of Covid Lockdown to DJ for one of the earlier Virtual Festivals. I’ve been playing for 20 years and have had plenty of horror stories involving poorly organized events. IDK if it was the fact that the idea of virtual festivals were new or if it was just a horribly unorganized group of promoters. This particular VF was chaos. The closer to event day I was encountering more and more stress.
This would be a good time to mention I have epilepsy which for the most part is manageable. The likelihood of me having a seizure seems to increase when I’m under increased stress.
The day of the event arrived and I couldn’t reach the organizers, I lacked the proper login information for the event, I couldn’t get anyone to respond to me to help explain logistics at all, and I felt my stress rising.
I was scheduled to play at 2 AM, but I got called up an hour and a half early. Still lacking any info. 15 mins into my DJ set I started noticing my aura which indicates a seizure approaching. In front of a global audience I collapsed. Breaking gear and tearing down my studio in process. I woke later in the hospital unsure of what exactly happened. I got to watch it on replay since my computer recorded it. I never heard back from VF promoters and never got paid.
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Was in a meeting messing around with zoom backgrounds smiling and giggling about them. Unbeknownst to me everyone could see my backgrounds without confirming. Got called out by someone saying, “are you having fun there?” I stopped immediately.
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My biggest work from home fail was opening Zoom five times for a meeting and actually being in the meeting five times. It was hilarious because there was over 80 people in the meeting and when I talked it echoed so it was so embarrassing. I had to shut off my computer and start all over again just to get back in the meeting and prevent this from happening again! #AnkerWork
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the constant battle with the mute button. on mute and talking away, not being on mute when you should be, telling people they are mute, the pauses while people are looking for the mute button…
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During my Fantasy Football draft I changed my background image to one of my fellow league member’s mugshot from 20+ years ago. The next time I used Zoom was for a statewide meeting for First Responders to discuss Covid response. It took me a few minutes to remove it and in the mean time all of the participants were laughing and begging for an explanation.
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In a Masters level Spiritual Direction certificate Zoom call we were sent to privately work for a bit before rejoining the discussion by muting our microphone and pausing our camera. Due to a quick mishap in which the prof muted and then unmuted the whole room while I stepped away, I didn’t know I was un-muted. I turned on our family mix Spotify playlist which includes some rap songs with explicit lyrics from my adult kids. It started off with a rather popular song about a body part, and within 20 seconds I had multiple people from class including the prof asking me to stop and mute while clutching their pearls. I didn’t get full participation points that day… #Fail
Welp, my biggest WFH fail isn’t the typical bathroom noise or pantsless partner story. Those have happened, but I think my biggest WFH fail was an actual, technical failure. We had ice storms a month or so ago that took out power for 10 full days. Of course, I didn’t work for the first few. Eventually, you get bored of doing nothing so I tried to get some work done. I ran a generator to charge a large battery which I then connected to the MacBook. I then charged my iPad to use as a hotspot so that I could get logged in. I was pretty proud of my power-outage WFH hack. What I didn’t anticipate was the fact that our Verizon tower was also offline from the ice. So I had a connection, but it was that dreaded 1x where the 4G LTE should be. Still determined, I tried logging in anyway. I spent an hour or so entering passwords, connecting to VPN, getting booted from VPN, rinse and repeat. End result, I gave up. Totally defeated by the ice storm, that was my biggest fail.
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While I was on a video call, two of my kids started chasing each other behind me screaming, “Tra la la!” while wearing a cape and only their underwear. They were playing Captain Underpants. They got a good laugh out of it!
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My son ran into my home office with no pants on. He yelled, “I pooped my pants and the dog pooped in the hall.” Luckily, I was only giving a client demo and only his shirt was seen in the camera.
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Was talking in Teams about how big of a douche one of our coworkers was with one guy, wound up typing it and sending in a large group chat with him in it instead of to our private chat, oh and most of management too!
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My biggest fail was because my camera was off, but I was not on mute. I called my spouse over to see the “Brady Bunch Rejects” and began to sing an x-rated version of the Brady theme song customized to my fellow co-workers. “here’s a story of an ugly manager, who was hooking up with three ugly girls. All of them are drinking wine, like their manager, the newest one has shine. Here’s the story of a (the rest is edited due to r-rated content)” … I was interrupted right after the profanity started! Thankfully the group had a sense of humor and didn’t take it personally and promised not to let HR know.
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I’m a little deaf from 15 years of playing music, so my voice kind of carries outside of the house. One day I was doing a demo with a vendor and we were chatting as usual, and I had to excuse myself and walk outside because the gardeners out front were making too much noise.
As I get back to my desk, the vendor asks me out of the blue “do you live in x street, because I think you live right in front of me”. Turns out, not only was this person my neighbor, he also could hear his entire demo coming out of my (Soundcore!) speaker because I had to crank the volume way up. Small world.
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My biggest work from home fail was thinking I closed out of a zoom meeting to get on another call. Not only did I not exit the zoom meeting ( which I thought I did) but I never muted myself after informing the clients I was leaving (thinking it was closed out). I was speaking on the second call with my iPhone at my desk and the client from my first call were able to hear me for the first 5 minutes and (to my horror) we’re exclaiming for me to hang up! I received a text from my manager of my disruption! The only silver lining was that I wasn’t on camera as well 
. Always double check the settings, never assume. #AnkerWork
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The biggest fail is that I can’t make myself to work at home((((( My bed looks so cozy every single morning, and snack breaks are getting longer every single time 
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