VoIP overdose

 

I have been working remotely for on and off through my career. I started back in the day when Skype was actually working good and video calls were still not a thing. Web cams were just making a break through and the calls were slo-mo by default. I have seen and tried almost all of other tools as well, mostly by necessity and I don't have a favorite, every tool for the proper job.

Even though VoIP tools are irreplaceable long distance communication tool, my opinion is that they have been abused since day one. These tools are abused on so many levels, the biggest being the abuse of time. I will get to that later, I first want to share a couple of misuses I have been doing as well.

1. Heavy data storage. I find myself often sending files to someone just so I have them for later use on another device. Its stupid, I know, but I still do it sometimes, I'm just used to it.
2. Light data storage. Talking to a person sitting next to me. This is again for recall purposes and for chat history. So I know what we have aggreed upon in the past.
3. Wiki page. Group chats are like an unorganized, unstructured, messy and unreadable wiki page. Everybody pastes everything, rarely anyone reading anything. Unless you need a password for that thing, from 3 years ago.
4. Chat Bots. I can write a whole book on this topic, but for now lets say people would opt for convenience over security and they should stop. Slack bots that run containers in AWS? Really? What can go wrong?
5. Business meeting alternative. This is the biggest abuse and I want to focus on it lastly.

These tools are not designed to be a meeting alternative. Any meeting that can be done live, should be done so. These tools were designed as a patch for remote attendees, not the main driver. I have several bad examples that originate from the concept that: "It's OK not to attend the meeting next door, I will use the remote link". NO! It's only OK if you are in Australia, disabled, or didn't put make up today. Otherwise get your lazy ass up and go the the next door meeting.

Attending meetings remotely (when possible otherwise) poses the following problems:

• Your full attention is not on the meeting, but on your surroundings. Instantly the meeting loses a lot of significance and goes in the background. Unless you are using VR goggles, those are cool.
• You don't mind your manners, since you have the false feeling of isolation. I have heard people flushing the toilet whilst being on a meeting, forgetting to mute themselves. The same goes for eating, burping, drinking and smoking on the microphone. This is very unprofessional and annoying. 
• You become unaware of time. Remote meetings are easily hijacked and more often than not, the topic drifts away. The reason for this that you are not pressed by real world limitations, like the conference room being needed for the next meeting, people needing to go to another meeting, having to go to lunch (see above). So you become unaware of the amount of time you've been blabbering about your cat.
• You are unaware of other people body language. You can talk about your cats for 2 hours and you will not see anyone rolling their eyes... and that is bad, very bad.
• Often time you don't know who is speaking, so you loose a lot of context
• When speaking you can't stand, so a lot of significance is lost, when live the speaker should preferably stand, unless prevented by some means.

Because of above misuses, we start treating meetings as an informal gatherings, get carried away talking, and then get offended when someone interrupts you with the notation that he has to work, or go home. 

Granted, the global pandemic made things worse, however we can't treat VoIP as a replacement for office time, we can't call colleagues just to check what's up. 

There are other tools for that, they are called beer and coffee respectively.