Some Funny Things Happened On The Way To My Grave

This a short story, that requires a longer introduction to understand the greatness of my humiliation.

In my work I assist people with a lot of conferencing, in this case, web-conferencing. This morning there were two computers involved in the presentation process. The "host" computer launched the meeting and has control over muting online attendees & other configuration settings. The host then grants permission to the "presenter" computer, allowing someone other than the host to actually be displaying sides and speaking to all the people attending via web.

After assisting them both through the setup process, I noticed the host PC still had it's webcam on. This meant that although the host PC was not the one displaying the presentation, everyone was still able to see the host's face in a small video window. This could be distracting, so I suggested we turn it off. But the function to completely disable the webcam had been removed from the interface and replaced with a "freeze image" button; basically like a pause button for live video.

Pat yourself on your back if you see where this is going.

Completely disabling the webcam would require exiting the web interface and restarting the meeting, possibly dropping all the attendees, obviously something we didn't want to risk doing a couple minutes before start time. So I leaned over and told the host to just go ahead and use the freeze feature and then left the room as the meeting kicked off. I returned to my office and brought up the web meeting on my office PC to make sure everything looked & sounded right...and to my dismay I found this:



Yup, when the host pressed the "pause" button, the last image it captured was me standing in front of it. That would be MY ginormous pot-belly and man-boobs (moobs if you will) frozen in time for all the meeting attendees to be blinded by. Now you may say, "But there's only seven participants in the meeting window, so it's not THAT bad is it?" What I failed to mention earlier is that each "participant" is a room. A large room. Each one is a conference hall actually; with one laptop at the podium that connects to the webcast. And that laptop is usually projected onto a screen. A large screen. Ours is 16 feet. You think TV is supposed to add a few pounds?! Try having your gut, in all it's gelatinous glory, enlarged to the size of a small car. I just walked a mile in Al Roker's shoes.

And there was nothing I could do...the meeting was going, so my paunch had it's 15 minutes of fame extended to just under an hour. I am Jack's diminished self-esteem.