Suzanne Harrington: Minding your pees and Qs working at home

We’ve all seen the clip of the woman in the Zoom business meeting who unthinkingly took her phone with her to the loo, and unwittingly broadcast herself peeing not just to her colleagues, but to the entire internet, writes Suzanne Harrington

Now that we are all in what Albert Camus calls “exile at home”, sales of his 1947 novel The Plague have gone mad, just like the book’s townspeople: “The plague left them idle, reduced to wandering round and round in the mournful town, day after day, engaged only in illusory games of memory.”

They should have downloaded Zoom. Then, instead of wandering around being miserable, they could have stayed in and worried about whether people could see their double chin from their laptop angled the wrong way. Or worse. We’ve all seen the clip of the woman in the Zoom business meeting who unthinkingly took her phone with her to the loo, and unwittingly broadcast herself peeing not just to her colleagues, but to the entire internet. Just like the virus we’re all hiding from, she went viral.

But maybe Peeing Woman could be a turning point. Maybe we all need to relax – although perhaps not quite that much – about how we present ourselves on Zoom and Skype and all those other mediums which now constitute real life. The traditional convention, so magnificently upended by the small children of professor Robert Kelly in that livestreamed BBC interview two years ago, has always been to pretend that your home is not your home. What made the interview so hilarious was not his cute kids or frantic spouse trying to claw them backwards out of the room, but Kelly’s frozen refusal to break the pretence that he was not at home.

We have learned from that moment of internet gold to always weld the door shut before Skyping. In more recent times, we have also learned to angle the webcam to reflect a bookcase in the background, its titles carefully curated to make us look more intelligent. We might be naked from the waist down, but we’ll have put on lipstick or a tie, sat fully upright, and put on not just our telephone voice, but our laptop face. Earnest, exuding gravitas. Heaven forbid people suspect our proximity to the clamour and mess of those non-professional humans who insist on calling us Mum or Dad during office hours.

Author and social activist Naomi Klein smashed this convention during a webinar on disaster capitalism and the American elite the other night (I know, I know, I should have been watching Netflix like a normal person). Mid-eviscerating Steven Mnuchin, former Goldman Sachs hatchet man turned Trump’s treasury secretary (who once foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman on the grounds that she owed 27 cents – this is not a typo), Klein was interrupted not only by her child, but by her dog and then her partner. The whole family said hello to her global audience of 14,000.

Instead of doing a Kelly, Klein good humouredly reminded us that home is not a formal workplace, but where the family lives. Then she carried on, seamlessly. Now that is professional. As for the rest of us – just don’t take your phone to the bathroom.