It never hurts to think about the unintended consequences of our actions.
These days, with Covid-19 upending lives all over the planet, coping with unexpected outcomes is a daily duty, and the one at the front of my mind is this: everybody’s a television presenter now.
It’s all about video conferencing. Many of us, who are lucky enough to have retained our jobs during the pandemic, are spending a lot of time on camera.
This has coincided with an inability to get a haircut, so each day I look more and more like I’ve recently gone through a messy divorce and I’m sleeping in my car just for a few days until I can get my hands on a bit of cash.
The scruffier I get, the more the people I know learn how to use Zoom, Microsoft Teams and the like, and gain the ability to see me. I’m not terribly vain but I prefer not to resemble someone who just emerged from suspended animation on an ill-fated mission to explore deep space. There are only so many excuses for leaving the camera turned off.
But there is one benefit: now we can peek into everybody’s houses.
Just look at the TV news. How long are all those politicians spending, arranging books behind them so they look erudite? Why does everybody have the same shelves? And the kitchens – how do they get them so clean? Mine has jam stuck to the wall… at least, I hope it’s jam.
By the time you read this, I hope to have transformed a small part of my home into a camera-worthy mini-studio. I’m breaking the paint out over the weekend, to give one wall a consistent colour, and then I’m going to hang some pictures. Maybe people will think I’m a grown-up.
Are you ready for your close-up? I’m not, but I’m trying.
And let’s remember that, if we’re safe at home joking about video conferencing, we’re privileged. Meanwhile, key workers are saving lives and keeping our economy running, and doing it anonymously, off-camera. That’s an outcome nobody was expecting. They are all heroes.
