It was a day for working at home. I was supposed to be chairing a meeting with 3 other folks. Since at least 2 of the others were also working at home, I changed it to a webex meeting.

Webex is a utility that allows people to dial in to a teleconference and view each other’s computer screens. So instead of describing what was on the computer screen, we could actually show it.

For this meeting, we only needed to talk to each other so I didn’t bother to make my screen visible to the others while we discussed our concerns. That soon changed and I brought up a display of a document for everyone to see.

After discussing the document for a while the discussion moved to issues such as which teams will perform which roles, which managers should attend which meetings. These topics did require my attention but not all of it.

On another computer, I started checking the contents of a disk drive which contained some media files. Apparently, this disk had a few episodes of something called “John Doe” and all of a sitcom called “Titus”. I disconnected the disk and went back to the computer that was hosting the teleconference.

That’s when I realized that I didn’t actually switch computers – I was displaying the directories of the media disk on the computer that I was sharing with my coworkers. Did I mention that my boss was in this meeting?

Poot!

No ons’s said anything yet. Maybe they were too enthralled with the discussion to notice. Maybe they were checking their own media files.