You had to be there
An office runs on things nobody writes down, because everybody was there when they happened.
On my second Monday working from home, somebody in the conference room said “no, this one” and pointed at the TV.
I don’t know which one. I was the speakerphone.
I moved away from San Diego at the start of September, to a small town in the Central Valley. I kept my job. The setup already existed, because two people in our Denver office have been dialing in for as long as I’ve worked here. There’s a phone in the middle of the conference table and a chat channel for everything else. I’m the third voice on the speakerphone now, and five weeks in I have some notes.
Can everybody see this?
Most of what gets said in that room assumes you can see it. “This one.” “The thing on the left.” Somebody draws three boxes on the whiteboard with an arrow between two of them, and the whole room nods at the arrow.
None of that is rude. I did all of it for three years. When everyone can see the screen, pointing is faster than describing. Describing things out loud for the benefit of a phone feels a little like narrating your own life, so nobody does it.
I’ve started asking. “Which one?” works about half the time. The other half, somebody picks up the phone and holds it closer to the TV, which is kind and does nothing at all.
The whiteboard is worse. At the end of a meeting somebody takes a photo of it for me from wherever they happen to be standing. The overhead lights land as a white smear across whichever box turned out to matter. I’ve gotten pretty good at reading around glare.
The meeting after the meeting
The call ends when the calendar says it ends. The meeting doesn’t.
Half the room stays behind to finish a thought. Somebody stops at somebody else’s desk on the way out, and an hour later the plan is different. I find out when a ticket gets reassigned, or when I open a pull request against a branch that stopped mattering at lunch.
Nobody’s hiding anything from me. I don’t think anybody has once decided to leave me out. The conversation just keeps going after the phone hangs up, and the phone was me. I’m sure I did the same thing to Denver more times than I could count. It’s not a decision anyone makes. It’s what happens to a conversation when some of the people in it are made of plastic.
Most of what an office knows, it knows by being there. Who’s out Thursday, which client is unhappy this week, that the checkout thing is fine now because somebody said so by the coffee machine. None of it gets written down because it never had to be. You were there.
Sorry, go ahead
There’s about a second of lag on the line, which doesn’t sound like much until you try to get a word in. I start talking into what sounds like a pause and so does somebody in the room. We both stop, and then we both say “sorry, go ahead” at the same time. It happens about twice a meeting. Most days I let the room have it.
Silence is the other thing. In person you can watch a room agree with you. On the phone, a pause after I say something could be agreement, or confusion, or somebody reading an email, or the mute button. I’ve started ending things with “does that make sense?” which I used to think was a slightly needy thing to say. On a speakerphone it isn’t needy. It’s the only way to find out.
Denver, I owe you one
Two years ago I wrote that chat had done more for the two people in our Denver office than good intentions ever had. I still think that’s true. I also had no idea what I was talking about. I’d watched them be out of the loop from inside the loop, which is a bit like describing the weather from indoors.
They’ve been very gracious about me finding all this out years after they did. One of them messaged me in my first week to say, more or less, “welcome to the phone.” It’s the most useful onboarding I’ve gotten at this job.
Pics or it didn’t happen
I’ve changed two small things, both of them about writing.
I take notes in every call now and post them in the project’s channel afterward. It started as self-defense. If I’m the one who can’t see the whiteboard, I’m the one who needs it written down, so I might as well be the one writing it. People who were sitting in the room read them too. They reply to fix a number, or to ask “wait, is that what we decided?” More often than I’d have guessed, it wasn’t.
And when a decision happens somewhere I wasn’t, I ask for it in the channel instead of asking the person. It’s not a complaint, just a “can you drop that in the channel?” so it exists somewhere the next person can find it. Denver has been asking for exactly that for years, I’ve since learned. It lands a little differently when there are three of us.
For what it’s worth, I don’t want the office to slow down on my account. Being in the same room is faster. A building full of people typing to each other across a table so the phone can keep up would be a strange place to work. Most of the time a decision at a desk is the right call. I’d just like it to leave a note.
Last week a meeting ended and the call dropped, and about 10 minutes later a photo of the whiteboard showed up in the channel. Nobody had asked for it. The glare was across the top left, and everything I needed was in the bottom right.