The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I have this 1% for Art project that ordinarily would require meetings that I would have to drive or fly to and usually stay overnight in some fleabag motel with the other tenants who mostly rent by the week or month or the rest of their lives. Now some folks like to travel on their jobs and I admit I thought I might too, but hauling over snowy passes in winter or navigating the freeway system of Los Angeles or trying to find something to do in fun-filled Salt Lake City, Utah took a lot of the joy out of visiting exotic places. Spend a night or two in Yakima and tell me you can’t wait to go back. I can wait.

But this year is the Year of the Plague. Meetings are scheduled now as virtual meetings. Maybe you’ve had the pleasure of Zoom Meetings, little talking heads lined up in the corners of your computer screen, an annoying delay in the sound, everything about as real as a late 20th century video game. Better than nothing, you might say.

Course, I wouldn’t. My first attempt at one of these virtual meetings was a total bust. I bought a teeny external camera, cheapest one I could find online, and when I experimented with it, the image I saw of myself on the silver screen was anything but silver, it was pink. Everything behind me was pink too. Not quite Pepto Bismol nauseous pink, but plenty sickening. When the time came to log in for our meeting, my committee informed me they couldn’t see me on their screen. I assured them they were the lucky ones. You know, a little humor to lighten the mood. You learn real quick humor on a zoom meeting is likely to fall on its pink face.

We managed to get through the first meeting without a virtual visual of the artist himself, okay with me, just a disembodied voice they might associate with some movie actor they were reminded of … and hopefully admired. Second meeting I bought a different camera, not exactly high end, but at least the image I got on my own computer was semi-natural, you know, if anything about this is natural. When the meeting started, the committee said they could see me just fine (oh swell) but they couldn’t hear me. I suspect this is the nature of zoom meetings, glitches, ignorance, fumbling, scrambling for a remedy, a comedy of errors. After a few minutes we discovered that if I turned off the camera, they could hear me just fine. Of course I wondered if this was a ruse to get me to go dark, 30 seconds of my face being more than enough for all of them.

The last meeting I didn’t go out and buy a 200 dollar state of the art video camera, opting instead for the voice-over, no visual. And no, I didn’t try the humor approach by suggesting I was wearing nothing below the belt, not after that last attempt. I suspect my camera actually has a teeny tiny tinny mic imbedded in it that I need to command to work instead of the default microphone, why they can’t hear me when they could see me. I suppose I could troubleshoot it, get tech support, schedule a test meeting and see if my theory is correct. But you know, don’t you?, that I’m not going to do that. What they don’t see won’t hurt them one little bit. Ignorance may not be bliss, but I’m happy to report it does have some advantages. And I don’t mean not wearing pants to my meetings.

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Welcome to the future, everybody, a virtual world where we all live on a computer and communicate by email or cellphone or just about anything other than physical encounters. Some of my friends (who apparently never met me) ask if I’d like to join them in zoom meetings. Last time I checked, my computer didn’t come with a built-in camera, meaning, Amazon and Google don’t get to spy on me. I even turned off the microphone after the mizzus and I had a conversation about a possible trip to the southwest and she instantly got a pop-up ad for motels in Phoenix. Just a coincidence? Or paranoia running rampant in the time of Covid? You tell me.

I just won’t be telling my eavesdroppers….

But because I am still a ‘working’ artist, meaning I haven’t made my semi-retirement a full time position just yet, I have a public art project that demands that I attend zoom meetings. Reluctantly I bought the cheapest camera made by child labor in some third world hellhole and spent a day trying to figure how to use it. Needless to say when the meeting started, nobody could see my handsome visage, fine by me, all they got was a disembodied voice without the Boris Karloff in a weird shade of pink only I could see on my own screen.

Since this was the first of a few more such meetings, I purchased a mid-priced spy camera that seemed to auto-focus and gave me a more human skin coloration than the previous piece of junk. The next zoom meeting I could see them and they could see me. Trouble was, if they could see me, they couldn’t hear me. If they could hear me, they couldn’t see me. We opted for the disembodied voice once more. Lucky them, I said.

Now I love technology as much as the next Luddite South Ender. Give me a new gizmo and let me spend hours figuring out what I’m doing wrong, what better way to spend a day or three? I have the next zoomer meeting coming up next week and I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong that sound and sight aren’t synched. So I’ve decided to go without the visual. Course, I’m pitching designs for an art project, kind of falls into that visual category.

No doubt we’ll sort this all out. Probably after I lose the project. But for my pals who want to engage me in a zoom meeting, hey, call me on the phone. Landline only. Last thing I need is some cellphone I can’t figure out either…..

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