The Leader Has Not Yet Arrived

In the beginning there was the telephone. People talked to each other, someone answered it at the other end and things got done. And then God said, "Let there be speaker phones" and there was... lots of noise. And God saw that it was bad and He said "Let there be no speaker phones" but nothing happened since the Universe didn't support rollbacks yet. So God sighed and made a note to include that in the next service pack.

People still got things done, by pretending they couldn't hear dumb people. They did this by paying the phone company for scratchy lines. That is until God had a particularly bad hair day and He said "Let there be conference calls". There was a long pause. And then He said "F***!" and there was that all around.


Speaking into a conference call is like speaking into a dark room full of voices. You can't figure out if someone is talking to you, or if they're simply muttering to themselves.

You enter a whole new world when you dial in. People turn into someone else entirely in an audio conference. It's just like second life (the game... for all those losers out there who have er... no second life). The only saving grace is that you probably get shooed in by a female voice that tells you pressing pound 6 mutes your line. Second life just beeps at you.

Wonder where the class monitor went, the who told on us when we forgot to bring our... er... oh well.... Well, they grew up to be the beep monitor, the person who joins the call five minutes early, listens for beeps with no names and goes, "I heard a beep. Who just joined?". The best way to get back at someone like that is to join the call and beep randomly. After the first fifteen "Who just joined?" the beep monitor should tone down. Visualize 10 people walking into your conference and refusing to speak when you ask them who they are.

Lurkers usually join the call late and have something relevant to say. But they usually listened to the girl who told them to press pound 6 to mute and forgot the rest. The unusual ones say something like "Ah... er..." and then go back on mute. The extreme lurker dials into 10 different calls at one time and if they're feeling extremely evil do it in the same room, switch them all to speakerphone... and then take them all off mute.

If Superman dialled into a Justice League conference call and wanted to be a repeater I'd say go for it. He can actually hear better. So when the line's bad you know that he's probably the only one who heard Batman say that he thinks he left the stove on. Anyone else who tries to do that should probably just suck on kryptonite. It's just like having an extra pin in an iron maiden, totally redundant, like this phrase before this one, and the one just before this one, and the one...

You probably already know about the feedback loop, the high pitched whine that tells you someone in the same room is already dialled in to the same conference. It is said, and in rare cases noticed, that there exists a perfect combination of distance that causes no whine. Anything you say then make continuous rotations with increasing speed on the lines till it flies off the line into an adjacent line. It's also a convenient way to explain away something you meant to say on mute. Like "This is a complete waste of time."

And on that note we end this drawl. If you have nothing else to do, kindly meditate on the uselessness of the fork in a noodleless world.


Notes

A slight clarification to prevent an unnecessary restructuring of the moral framework built around a similar four lettered word - God said Fork! when He said F***!