Webinembarrassment

For my job, I run webinars twice a month. "Webinar" has become a regular word in my vocabulary, but for all you non-geeks (basically all of my friends reading this), it's a live meeting over the Internet where people attending can chat by text while a presenter talks and gives a PowerPoint presentation or shares his computer screen so people can see what he's doing live. My role is to talk for 1 minute to start the webinar, make sure all the technical stuff like recording, sound and screen sharing works, and talk for 1 minute at the end to wrap it up. It sounds simple but wonky stuff always happens so I'm constantly nervous about them.

At the end of today's webinar during the question period, a bunch of co-workers were standing at the next desk and they started to get too loud while we were still recording. I yelled at them, but apparently my mute button didn't work and you could hear my, "I'm on a webinar!" in the presentation. If you want to hear the shameful spectacle, go here and drag the time to 44:23. I was so embarrassed listening to it, I got dizzy.

Previously, I tried to avoid the noise problem by using an empty office that's enclosed. So of course that time I lost my wireless Internet connection half-way through, and since I control the sound streaming to the Internet, there was 10 minutes of silence (which couldn't be edited out of the recording) while I tried to reconnect back at my desk.

Another fun one was when we first started the webinars, we were advised to buy an expensive device for streaming the sound so we'd get better quality. The device was so powerful it would pick up nearby radio signals, so any time I used it you could hear a sports broadcast from a local radio station playing in the background. I tried filtering devices, wrapping wires in protective aluminum foil, pagan dances... and eventually bought a $20 plastic doo-hingey to replace the expensive device and it's never given me a problem.

But yay for me! I still manage to stay gainfully employed! I'm going to go blonde again so that errors like these are just self-explanatory.