After a few months of working at home in my basement, I’ve attended a lot of teleconferenced meetings. In the past, a meeting usually had at least one or two folks dialing in. Now we were all dialing in all the time to even more meetings.

We were all getting past the usual foibles of teleconferencing : “we can’t hear you”, “can you hear me?”, “Bill, turn off the gosh darn mute button”, “put some pants on!”

While I was in one meeting, Pam started vying for my attention. I muted the mike and talked with Pam for a while.

I soon heard a teammate saying “Steve! Steve! Are you talking to us?” in a way that said that they knew that I wasn’t talking to them.

I said “Sorry about that” and muted the mike for real this time.

I felt horribly embarrassed and furiously tried to remember if I’d said anything untoward (“hey, baby, let’s get dirty”, “these bastards are boring and stupid”). I’m pretty sure that I didn’t.

Later, I remembered seeing a recording of a video meeting and one of the women went to the bathroom. The camera was left pointing at her while she was on the throne. The faces of the other attendees were priceless. Then the camera went blank and someone said “poor Jennifer.”

Then I also remembered that during the first recording of the Supreme Court taking arguments over the phone included the sound of a toilet being flushed.

Then I didn’t feel so bad about talking to Pam about package deliveries.