An unsettling and inexplicable moment occurred at work yesterday. A Zoom meeting that had been scheduled for a long time with various people from our department was to begin at 1:30 p.m. I logged in right before the start time to discover that I was the only one in the meeting. I thought it was a little strange because naturally you have some people who are always early. Oh well, I thought.

A couple moments passed and no one else had joined the meeting. It was now 1:32 p.m. I quickly logged in and logged out of the meeting but I was still the only one in the virtual room. Then the Slack messages started coming asking if I was going to join the meeting. I frantically started to log in/out several more times while double checking links, re-starting Zoom, and switching browsers. Nothing worked. It was now 1:35 p.m. In a last-ditch effort to come up with a solution, I tried to invite everyone to my meeting room. However, two people were logged into the meeting from inside a conference room and couldn’t access my link.

At 1:37 p.m. my boss made an entirely new Zoom invite, sent it out, and thankfully I was able to log in. I had absolutely no idea why this freak occurrence had transpired in that when I logged into a Zoom meeting with the same link as all attendees that I was separated from everyone else. I told my colleagues on the new call that it was better that it happen now instead of that day when I meet with our university president (which of course no future meeting exists 😂).

This experience touched on all the fears that a Type-A individual like me harbors, namely failing to be punctual and loss of all control. It wasn’t unlike the recurring theme that I chronicled four years ago of me wandering the halls of an unfamiliar high school, unable to find the classroom that I need to report to so I can take a test I am completely unprepared for. Only this instance was real.

Hopefully this Zoom anomaly doesn’t occur again. It is unnerving that I don’t know why it happened. Thankfully, despite my anxiety during the troubleshooting, I was able to attend the meeting and life did go on. Shout-out to my patient colleagues! Don’t Blink.