Webinarcotics

I attended my first webinar today!

I had managed to get out of previous webinars because I always imagined that they would be pretty boring. I was very surprised to find out how wrong I was. The truth is that this webinar was far more boring than I could have ever imagined. I was surprised by this because in addition to having quite a good imagination, I am somewhat of an “awfulizer,” as my sister-in-law calls it. You know, those people who can make any situation seem much worse than it really is. So it was a real eye-opener to discover that something could be more boring than even I had imagined.

I discovered that there are five stages to webinar attention deficit, or WAD. If you can survive the first two stages, which are definitely the toughest, you will find that you will end up having a very successful and satisfying webinar experience.

1. In the first stage, one tries hard to pay attention, to read all of the poorly done Powerpoint slides, to follow what’s being said, in spite of the fact that the webinar speakers are apparently discussing something like municipal sewer repair in an unidentifiable Euroindonesian language. One wants to have a successful webinar experience, and to report back to one’s boss about how much one learned, so one furrows one’s brow, squints, frowns, and makes all of the appropriate facial and body language signs that one is trying really hard not... to... lose... consciousness.

2. (At this point, I am going to drop the whole “one” charade and use the second person because you know that I’m talking to you.) So, if you manage to remain conscious, you move on to the second stage of webinar attendance. You read the Powerpoint slides, trying–just for fun–to find some kind of sentient meaning in them. You try, really try, to discern some kind of human communication in them. It is strange because, though you know the meaning of all of the words in any given sentence, you cannot make out what the sentence as a whole was meant to say. It is as if they have taken out all of the verbs and used words like “actualization” instead. You are not really trying to understand at this point, you are just trying to keep yourself 1) awake, 2) conscious, 3) entertained, and/or 4) sane.

3. If you have gotten to the third stage without needing the intervention of a paramedic, I congratulate you. Stage three is that you get up from your computer, you quietly leave your office or cubicle, you go to the bathroom, you get some coffee, you stop and chat with a few co-workers whom you answer “Nothing much” to when they ask you what you are doing right now, you wind down the hallway to HR to see if they have any interesting insurance-regulation booklets that you might want to read when you return to the webinar, and, eventually, you return to the webinar, hoping that they will be wrapping things up by the time you return. It turns out that you were gone for only 12 minutes and you missed only two slides.

4. You settle back into your chair. You wonder if the other attendees can hear you over the phone. Is it like a conference call? Can they hear the background noises you’re making? Is it okay to eat, say, a very crunchy peanut butter wafer bar? Can you perform noisy bodily functions? What, exactly, can the other people hear? You worry about this for maybe four minutes, as you very quietly break off pieces of your peanut butter wafer bar and try to dissolve them in your mouth without chewing them. Finally, you realize that if you were to, say, pass gas, really loudly, it would be the most interesting thing that the webinar attendees had heard the whole time. You then begin crunching, munching, passing gas, and making every other kind of obnoxious, rude, offensive sound that you can think of. Stage 4 is a lot of fun for about 10 minutes. Longer, if you have not yet surpassed the maturity level of a fourth-grade boy.

You have now killed about 32 minutes of a one-and-a-half-hour long webinar.

5. You give up any pretense of paying attention. You get your iPod out and begin both listening to music, with just one earbud in, while also playing Angry Birds. This is the stage at which you realize that there really is something to these webinar things. Now you understand why they are so popular with your co-workers. At the end of the webinar, you sign up for the next one.

You then report back to your boss saying a lot of things like “I think that we could actualize this process in the building of better community resources by utilizing the development of more proactive parameters...or paradigms. Well, now I can’t remember exactly which word they used, but it was something like that.” Keep talking such nonsense until your boss’s eyes begin to glaze over, at which point, he or she will be so impressed that you actually paid attention that he or she will encourage you to take a long lunch. Anything to get you to leave.