Zooming through Life

My first Zoom experience bears no resemblance to the Zoom we know today. In my youth, Zoom was a children’s television show that aired on PBS. It included a group of highly energetic and slightly hyperactive children singing and dancing. They even spoke their own language. This language, Ubbi-Dubbi, required you to place the syllable “ub” before each vowel sound in each syllable of each word. The famous greeting they proffered was “H-ub-I, fr-ub-iends.” This is known in the vernacular as “Hi friends.” My siblings and I went around speaking Ubbi-Dubbi with each other and our friends. Of course, we never included words that had anything to do with the current computer app called Zoom. This was not because the online Zoom program hadn’t yet been invented. It’s because the word “online” hadn’t yet been invented – except when referring to the place you stood while waiting to pay for your merchandise. Ironically, in today’s pandemic environment, we no longer have that kind of “on line.” However, Ubbi-Dubbi is not quite a thing of the past. To this day, my siblings are known to greet each other with “H-ub-ow ub-are y-ub-ou,” just for old times’ sake.

It happens that Ubbi-Dubbi also helped me out one day when I least expected it. You see, at the end of each episode, the Zoom kids finished with a catchy jingle. One of the lines from this song included the show’s address. What, you might ask, does this have to do with adulthood? Well, many years ago I went to the post office to mail a package to my sister. It just so happens that she lives in the Boston area. The problem was I didn’t know her zip code. Before looking it up in her big zip code book, the clerk asked me if I knew any of the zip codes in the area. My first thought was that the request was ridiculous. After all, how would I know a zip code in the Boston area? Then, without warning, the Zoom song came zooming to my mind.

I told her the only zip code I know is from the song they used to sing on the TV show Zoom, which was produced in Boston. The problem with getting information via a song, of course, is that you have to sing the whole song in order to retrieve it. The clerk looked at me with a big smile and said, “Hit it.” Together, we quietly sang, “Z-double-O-M, Box 3-5-0, Boston, Mass. 0-2-1-3-4. Send it to ZOOM.” And there it was: 02134, the zip code I needed! The package got posted, and I practically skipped out of the post office, humming all the way.

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Fast forward to our current pandemic. Today’s Zoom is not one that infuses our lives with the sound of music. Instead, we are inundated with an array of faces. For those of you out there who are not in the virtual loop that has taken hold of the nation, Zoom is an online program that enables people to create meetings on a computer. You can see and hear each other as well as share documents, videos, and Power Points. There is a steep learning curve, to which many of us are clinging as our livelihoods depend on it. Grateful that we haven’t fallen off the curve, we continue to learn from our mistakes.

The program itself is relatively easy to use to create a classroom setting, however the added features can sometimes malfunction. In addition to meeting with a large group, Zoom offers a wonderful option where you can create smaller chat rooms. A teacher can, with the click of the mouse, assign students to small groups so they can work together. You get to choose the size of the group and, as the teacher, you can pop into each group to see how things are progressing – also known as spying. When the allotted time is up, you can bring everyone back together with another click of the mouse.

Here’s where things went wrong. I couldn’t find the “button” to click to take the students out of the chat rooms. After a moment of panic, I comforted myself with the following thoughts: First, they don’t know that I can’t find them. Second, they are not really lost since they are sitting in the comfort of their own homes. And finally, they’re probably thrilled not to have to listen to me lecture on and on. After another minute of distress, I called in an expert (my child), and she helped me figure out that the screen I needed was simply behind the screen I was looking at. Go figure.

Not losing my students is only one challenge I faced. Learning their names was another. You see, I recently started teaching a class that has never met in a face-to-face setting. Fortunately, I know some of the students from our pre-Corona lives, however, there are others I have never met. This really should not present a problem since Zoom has a built-in feature where the students’ “names” appear below their picture. Unfortunately, reality is not that simple. First of all, the “name” is not always their name. Some students are using their parents’ computer, which now gives me insider information in case I need to look them up in the Eruv List. Other students only typed in their first name, and the second name shows up as the brand of their computer, for some reason. For example, I have been teaching a “Rivka Dell” and an “Esther Hewlett Packard.” Finally, there are cases, which thankfully I do not have, where a child has typed her “name” by pressing a random assortment of keys. In fact, my nephew, who is nine years old, comes up as slkj2wie9akle6z. As my sister said, “That’s what you get when you let a kid fill out the information.”

An additional problem with Zoom is that the screen is not big enough to accommodate everyone’s picture, so you can’t see all your students simultaneously. This is compounded by the problem that, when they do appear in front of you, they are not in the same spot on the screen that they previously occupied. Needless to say, it’s like playing a game of musical squares.

Yet, despite my original hesitation and difficulties, I discovered that Zoom can inspire creativity. I learned this while watching a Torah video discussing new parenting issues that, due to Corona, we’ve never faced before. The speaker, who is also a father, related how he recently bumped into his son. Normally this wouldn’t be noteworthy since his son is 14 years old and lives in the same house with his father and his mother and all his siblings. The difficulty was that this man bumped into his son in the kitchen when he should have been “in class.” Mr. Father asked his son what he was doing. After a little hemming and a lot of hawing, the son sheepishly told his father that was taking a break.

“But won’t your rebbi know you’re not in class?”

“Well…” responded the son. This was enough for his “father radar” to kick in and inspire him to march his son back upstairs to uncover what was really going on. There on the Zoom screen, along with the angelic faces of all the other teenage boys in his class, was his son’s picture. Knowing that, despite the technologically advanced world we are living in, it still isn’t possible to be in two places at once, the father pointed to the screen and said, “Explain.” It seems that the son took a screen shot of himself, posted it on the computer, and went merrily on his way down to the kitchen. If you don’t understand what just happened here, you probably don’t have teenagers in your household.

All in all, Zoom is a wonderful tool to help us navigate through these difficult times. But, although many of us have adapted to commuting from the living room to the dining room, even this can present a challenge. As we gulp down our coffee while tripping over the computer cord, it has become abundantly clear that zooming through life was never meant to be. Maintaining our perspective and connecting in a meaningful way takes effort and awareness. So, take the time to smell the coffee (even if it ends up in a puddle on the floor)[ and greet each person – whether online or on line – with a warm and sincere “H-ub-i, fr-ub-iends.” It will virtually make a world of difference.