Understanding zoom.

I moved into a new position at the patent office this week where I’ll spend 30% of my time in Zoom meetings. I did this primarily because after I gave up my nursing job, I felt like I needed to do something different professionally – it wasn’t going to be going to nurse practitioner school (which I had turned down for a Fall 2022 start and had been the original plan back in 2013 when I started regular nursing school). It’s a program where they selected 36 examiners from across the agency to work together to brainstorm ideas to improve the examination process and then test them out before implementing them across the corp. There are 8,000 examiners across the country, so it could impact a lot of people’s workflow. I also did this because I kind of missed the entire pandemic driven evolution of work-from-home in the sense that my work from home job rarely involved other people, I really just worked by myself. And my not-work-from-home job involved absolutely no zoom meetings at all. So I felt like I wanted to understand this new “work culture” of zoom meetings. Which is different! I’ve had 3 hour meetings every day this week in which I’m just listening and participating in only occasionally. The first thing I noticed I needed was something to do with my hands so I wasn’t so completely bored and wander from the meeting, but nothing too exciting so I wouldn’t pay attention. Jeremy immediately recommended solitaire (he’s been at this zooming for a long time). I find sewing to be the right fit – I used to hand sew all of Edda’s bibs (which are a bandana with a small square face towel sewn in to make it absorbent) and I had to give it up to machine sewing many years ago because I didn’t have the time and she would go through them too fast for my hand sewing, but I reverted back to the hand sewing to get me through the meetings. (I like the hand sewn ones better. I wonder if I have any of the original ones left from when Edda was small. Unlikely.)

I’m more time constrained now, given the frequency of the meetings – I’m sure it’ll taper off in a few weeks. I was supposed to meet up with a pal on Tuesday to walk, I made it to the hiking spot, but her GPS took her in the opposite direction and we couldn’t meet up fast enough to get me back to my desk in time. So Elka and I walked on our own (quickly).