Conference call misdemeanours

What with the prevalence of these, incidences of boredom and associated working from home what misdemeanours have you, your friends, or your colleagues been rumbled for. Me – I operate good conf call hygiene in that I know where all the mute buttons are, I doublecheck where necessary and my PC webcam and microphone are properly disabled, but I’ve been busted by my one year old and also had the headphone jack (on mute) drop out of the phone whereby it somehow unmuted itself. Facetime can be a git too. In terms of what I’ve heard – badmouthing, someone having a pee and I’ve heard of but never seen numerous inappropriately dressed webcam moments.

A few years ago on a conference call with a partner in another office.

The line was a bit echo-y, so we asked him in jest if he was in the toilets. “Hahahahaha, of course not” he replied.

The call continued, with odd echoes and clunks in the background.

“Are you sure you’re not in the toilets?” We asked. “No, of course I’m not!” he responded, indignantly.

“Fssssshhhhh” came the unmistakable noise of the person the cubicle next to him flushing the toilet….

Have been caught out by technology on a few occasions. Recently with a new headset with a mute button. While it did mute the headset mic, it also caused the PC to switch to it’s internal mic. Took me about a week or two of conf calls to realise it was doing this 😳

Cats straying into the home office.
We used to have a monthly video conference call, one lad assumed that as we had crap sound and vision the other end did too. I sat in at the other end one day… His mutterings were crystal clear along with the cheeky V’s he was flicking that he thought were off cam.

I got caught out claiming to be in the office on a call with a client and then the postie turning up and the dog going mental at the door.

I also heard a client, who I assume thought was on mute, screaming at her husband to “shut the ****ing kids up or get the **** out of the house while I deal with this ****” That had the rest of us in stitches because in the work environment she is very mild mannered and softly spoken.

People often go and fill up their bottles form the kitchen whilst on calls in our office. Sounds like they are taking a piss on the phone…

had one recently Where the training lady thought she was off mike went bat shit crazy about hating not being **** prepared for **** shitty waste of time meetings etc ….. she was either oblivious to the fact we all heard or very professional and just carried on like nothing happened.

I have no funny stories but this is good.

We had* two guys on the team who thought everyone else didn’t know they were doing next to nothing. The boss thought we making a big deal about carrying them.
So we had a call, them, me and the boss.
The boss asks the them, “well guys what’s the problem?”
“Its that Speshpaul, he is being a complete f****** t***!”
“Well Paul, I’m glad to hear you are doing your job!”

* had, as in past tense.

similar but different:

customer called me and had to leave a voicemail for me to discuss an order he was about to place. instead of hanging up, he must have missed the button, then placed his phone on the desk next to him.

the next 6 minutes were a complete record of him discussing with his colleague in depth exactly how he was going to shaft me, get the price down, make me sweat for the order, even though i was best value and the other competitor had so **** up their last order that they’d never deal with them again.

best bargaining position ever!

When my son was about 18 months I left him playing with my blackberry, came back a few minutes later and he was having a chat on speaker phone with one of my suppliers. She seemed quite happy chatting to him so I left them to it for a bit before stepping in.

None interesting but we’re increasingly been asked to WFH ( which is about 50/50 with me ATM ) so we’re all used to one another over the last few years since being rolled out successfully.

We do on occasion cut the meetings short to get the just on upcoming cycling events, holidays, places to visit or new restaurants.

Often hear kids in the background on calls, once heard a builder giving one of his blokes a right going over, thankfully it was in Polish so no idea what he was on about – didn’t sound pretty mind.

Twice today one of the kids toys has spontaneously burst in to life in conference calls. No idea which one it is. Worst thing is I’m at home in my own

My biggest hate is people joining the call and not announcing themselves.

I may have mentioned that a senior partner should grow some balls with a client whilst at a previous company. Said partner was actually on the line… Luckily he took it well and did grow a pair.

Now when I’m running a call, I make sure I’m on the web thingy or Skype so I can see who’s dialled in.

Have variously had toddler phone the medical director while playing with my phone, and got busted washing the dishes while on the phone to a colleague in another organisation.

Not me, but someone I know drifted off then absent-mindedly made an enormous horse whinnying sound. After a brief pause, everyone carried on as if it hadn’t happened at all.

My biggest hate is people joining the call and not announcing themselves.

This is standard at our place – attendance is taken from the IM chat / screen share unless it’s just a small team meeting.

Not me, but someone I know drifted off then absent-mindedly made an enormous horse whinnying sound. After a brief pause, everyone carried on as if it hadn’t happened at all.

That happens loads (people making random noises) Sometimes people will say “whoever that is, you’re not on mute” but more often it’s just ignored. Cracks me up.

It used to be “Is someone playing guitar?”. Now its “Jim, stop playing guitar”. I had a wonderful webchat with a topless colleague one, I did tell her eventually that her camera was on! Working from home I often answer the door, deal with children, answer my other phone, surf the net etc. If they must insist on having stupid group calls where people discuss things they should have already sorted out, then I reserve the right to not concentrate!

Always, always put a bit of masking or duct tape over the webcam just in case!

A good few years ago I was in the process of selling some software to the South African police force to be rolled out nationwide ahead of the World Cup. We had a conference call with the force assistant commissioner. After a few minutes I noticed there was one extra South African accent on the call (only three of us on the call!).

Turns out my Tech Director who was the third person on the call has a South African brother in law. When they talk the tech director puts on a South African accent as a joke. He just slipped into the accent naturally. No idea if the commissioner noticed, got offended and scuppered the deal (it took a long time to go through and I left before anything completed).

Always, always put a bit of masking or duct tape over the webcam just in case!

And always assume the person working from home is naked while on a conf call…

In the office I have to make sure I turn off the browser with stw as when it gets dull I start reading random threads then get asked a question…

Presentations are another.

1, Close down ALL unnecessary browser windows and remove everything from the desktop except what’s needed
2, Close down Skype, Messages etc. I’ve seen some spectacular personal messages, including one suggesting what the presenter’s lady friend would like to do to the presenter popping up
3, As a corollary to #1, if you need to use a browser, make sure the history is cleared out. It’s not the time to see your list of porn or “niche” dating sites

A few years ago, the people I worked with didn’t quite get how conference calls could work…

I was used to being out and about, but was always the first on any call. I dialled in, and got the ‘we are waiting for your host’ message.

Host (a mate of mine) joined, so it was just me and him (you used to get a message saying so and so had joined/left the conversation)

He asked me if I knew where my colleague in the same roaming role was. I said ‘who knows where that c*** is, probably on the f****** golf course, the lazy b******’

Cue an out of character silence from the host. Turns out he had booked a room at the office and everyone – COO, CTO, CFO the lot…were in the room on a spider phone.

Couple of years ago I was in a conference call in our open plan office with, amongst others, a couple of colleagues from our southern office who weren’t normally at ours.

As we were waiting for everyone to turn up, an attractive and rather well endowed young lady walked through the office. One of the southern contingent politely hinted, “Jesus Christ, look at the bazongas on that!”

Said young lady then turned around revealing the Bluetooth headset perched in her offside ear. She was, of course, on our call…

I’ve forgotten to mute the mic, invariably I get bored about 15 mins in and start doing other stuff at the same time. The Boss had to ask me to stop typing so loudly and stop breathing when people are talking – I had a bit of a cold and spent 15 mins being the in-house heavy breather.

3, As a corollary to #1, if you need to use a browser, make sure the history is cleared out. It’s not the time to see your list of porn or “niche” dating sites

No no no no! That’s half the fun. You need to use a special browser that has all those niche websites primed and ready to pop up. If it’s going to be a tricky meeting, websites about guns works well…

Couple of things, one that i’ve done, one that a colleague did. Had two IM windows open, one was for sharing files around the conference call group (not allowed to share desktops with suppliers), one was an ongoing conversation with a friend of mine. Needless to say, my mate got a copy of the specs for the new system, the conference call group got to read our plans for the weekend. Nice.

On another occasion we had an emergency conference call with a supplier overseas, they dialed in early (5 am local or something) we dialed in late (10 or 11 pm). Half an hour into the rather heated and stressful call my colleagues wife gets home from the pub and starts ripping him new one for being such a wimp around his boss and missing a f**king brilliant meal and night out with their friends just so he could be on a conference call with some foreign dicks who couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery and so on. All very loud and obnoxious.

We all stopped to listen.

His contract was renewed. His marriage didn’t last. (apparently this was near the end of a long drawn out breakdown of the marriage.)

(And FWIW, the boss wasn’t actually a slave driving monster, we were all asked if the timing was ok, the guys who didn’t/couldn’t dial in, no problems, those who did got a half days pay for an hours work. I did three or four stints for the same boss and this was the only time he ever did it.)

I fell asleep on an incident call one night and woke up 2 hours later in a completely new incident call….took me a good while to work out what the F was going on. luckily my policy of not announcing my name on these type of calls worked in my favour and I made a hasty exit.

I had a bit of a cold and spent 15 mins being the in-house heavy breather.

One of my managers, years ago when conference calls were new, thought that turning the volume down was the same as muting the phone. So he had about half a dozen very very quiet conference calls, but we could hear EVERYTHING he was doing. Eating, drinking, burping, talking to his secretary. Complained about the volume, Telephony services fixed it, he turned the volume down, again……… very smart bloke when it came to hardware, bloody useless with anything else.

I was once sat on a call with our customer – several of them dialling in from various locations.
It was a Friday lunchtime, they were giving us an earful over our refusal to work the weekend on one problem, saying we weren’t committed etc. My boss was giving them an equal amount of grief in return about seeing children / spending time with family / setting a precedent and where does it end, ect…
Just then one of the customers kids burst in to his room shouting and messing about! There was a swift sound of him trying to hush them and shut the door, followed by a few moments of awkward silence and everyone at our end trying not to burst out laughing!
Eventually someone started the conversation and it was ignored, but that also abruptly ended the discussion about weekend working 🙂

I was WFH to attend to a poorly child, middle of a big call he walked into the room and announced very loudly that he had just sharted his pants.

As Atlaz says. Close stuff down.
My director has a habit of leaving email open with the little window popping up in the bottom right corner, with the sender and first line or two of the email.
Saw on pop up that was from HR:
Gary
George accepts at 38K

I interview a lot by Skype with people around the world.

Recently I had a lady who claimed her web camera wasn’t working and she could only Skype without it – alarm bells ring, it’s not 1995 anymore, anyway during the whole interview, every question I asked, she frantically turned pages, and then read out some answer roughly relevant to the question.

She asked later why she didn’t get the job, so I gave some helpful advice.

I have had late afternoon interviews regularly, and during one there was an incident in the car park that I had to go and deal with, asked the interviewee to hang on for two minutes while I told off a parent. Came back in to find my daughter sat at the computer talking to the person.

I was in a work call to our school in Bangkok, and having had halloween I had a selection of hats in the office. They had issues with the projector, so I was only on one persons computer, and entertained myself for the majority of the meeting changing hats over at different points when people were speaking – witches hat, pirates hat, cowboy hat and a baseball cap.

IT guy forgot to mention that the projector was up and running near the end of the meeting; I am told the witches hat was the most popular.

Current contract’s CTO insists on running PowerPoint in edit mode when conferencing over Lync. Consequently no notifications are suppressed and pretty much everything in the presentation is illegible.

Worst misdemeanor I heard in a call was a few years back. Our team meetings used to be scheduled for an hour on a Friday afternoon, over lync, but would regularly extend to two as our manager could never keep to an agenda. After an hour and ten minutes we heard “?uck this crock o’shit” from one of my colleagues, followed by the sound of a headset being thrown to the ground. Our manager could neither believe her ears, nor work out who it was and went into a kind of confused panic saying “Excuse me, what was that? Who was that?” Over and over again.

She never did work out who it was, though I knew as I was IM-ing the perpetrator at the time:
Me>Was that you?
REDACTED> ?uuuuuuuuuck!
Me> Snigger! Naughty boy!