This Is the Smartest Zoom Hack We’ve Ever Seen.
Give your bored teen the opportunity to come up with one of the most inventive ways to “be present” in Zoom chat I’ve ever seen, especially if the chat is on the big side and someone isn’t paying too much attention to you. webcam in the grid view.
Now that we are in a week of no one knows what quarantine for most people, I feel like most of us would rather do something else than endure another video conference. I understand their importance, but sometimes you just need a break. Or maybe it just looks amazing on the outside and your body is demanding that you go for a walk instead of sitting in front of your laptop for the fourth hour presentation of the day.
Whatever the reason, grab a page from this fourth grader’s book (courtesy of Reddit ). If you want to skip a Zoom meeting, or at least give the impression that connectivity issues are preventing you from attending , do two things. First, place your fingers on the ALT + V and ALT + A keys to turn off the webcam and sound, respectively. ( Command + Shift + V and Command + Shift + A on your Mac.)
Then right-click yourself and select Rename if available. When you’re ready to “leave” the meeting, change your name to “Reconnect …” but don’t click OK yet. Press ALT + V and then ALT + A to delete video and audio, and then press OK to change your name. If you’re lucky, things should look pretty slick – your microphone and webcam will suddenly shut off and you’re now struggling to “reconnect”.
Is it really going to deceive everyone? Absolutely not. I would save this trick if you have a pretty strong belief that the person hosting the Zoom meeting, as well as the people attending it, are not very tech savvy. (If you really had connection problems, you would have stayed in the Zoom meeting, but your webcam video would have been frozen in time. There would have been no “connecting …” or “reconnecting …” on your frozen face.)
Eventually, your disconnected self will come out of the meeting. So if someone knows these details, your “Reconnect …” trick may not work. You can always take one or two hits: reset the Reconnect … parody, wait a few minutes, and then leave the meeting entirely. When asked later, tell them that you have a problem with Wi-Fi or something.
I mean, it’s a decent amount of effort to keep the meeting going, but at least it takes less effort than creating a looping video of you watching a fake meeting . I love the hilarity of it, but you have to get it just right to be believable. What if someone calls you with a question?