This morning, I had set up The Hourlings on Zoom early, before I went to bed, hoping, if I ran late, the meetup would already be set up, Marty would be early, and I could make him co-host in case I still needed time to read before we began at 10:00.
Instead, to my delight, my friend Cynthia was the first to log in around 09:30 and we had a few minutes to chat about life and her adorable Clove. I really admire Cynthia, or Max as she’s sometimes called. She writes some great LGBTQ literature and is a great guide of conscious for me. She’s also an ex-Marine. Sempre Fi, my friend!
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get her video working, so, thinking that it would be as simple as restarting the meeting, I did just that. She promptly requested to rejoin and I accepted, looking forward to continuing our conversation.
It failed.
We tried again. No dice. I created a new Zoom event. That didn’t work. I asked the account owner to try. Still no success. It was already 10:00 and almost everyone was waiting to get in. I accepted them all, but none of them could connect.
Finally, our unofficial moderator, Evan Friedman brought up an instance of Microsoft Teams. He, Marty, and I verified its feasibility a while ago, so I knew it could work and joined the Teams meeting. The nice thing is now Teams allows virtual backgrounds, which was cool. But, unfortunately, Teams was as wickedly hard to invite people into as before.
Meanwhile, Marty set up a Google Meet account. Back when we tried Google Meet before when I created a Google Apps account. Back then, you had to pay for a Google Meet account by having a Google Apps account, and the Google Meet didn’t have a grid view, however, it already accommodated a lot of people.
In the end, we went with Google Meet and decided to make that Meet event out official backup for whenever Zoom misbehaves again, though we shall still default to Zoom. Unfortunately, my nightmare hair isn’t hidden by Google Meet’s cameras like it is in Zoom, so I must have looked atrocious today. I wish the Hypochondriac would let me use my hair trimmer.
We found out during the meeting that we weren’t the only ones straining for Zoom capacity. Fortunately, there is a Zoom Status we can check the next time this happens, so we’re not left trying so hard to beat a dead TimeHorse. And the Zoom system was back up, just in time for us to finish our meeting.
Unfortunately, because of all the kerfuffle and notifications, I missed a 13:30 Zoom I was planning to attend. But at least I got to hang out with my fellow writers. Thank you for reading, and I should now get back to writing.
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