For the first time in a long time, I clicked on to the VCB. The Virtual Coffee Break, a long-standing remnant of the first weeks of lockdown is rolling on still. I thought I'd check in to see what was going down with my friends and colleagues.
What was going down was the tone.
As soon as I clicked into the meeting I was in a discussion that had come straight from a basement locker room. They were all joining in, talking about colloquialised sexual terms that people had misunderstood and had been using in the wrong context.
There was no swearing. The VCBers were at least cognisant that this wasn't a language free-for-all, though I'm absolutely convinced that if one had started effing and jeffing, they'd have all joined in. There was however, a steadily plummeting discussion of things that might be more appropriate for the Crown and Anchor, rather than a daytime work meeting.
I felt sick. I put the 'stunned face' emoji (wide open eyes and flushed cheeks) in the chat, and promptly left the conversation after less than a minute of sewage filth.
I've seen this before. I was on a train once when a bunch of lads got on - obviously heading for a stag do, obviously having only just met each other. They were polite at first, pushing and prodding for the boundaries, but with the general respect you give someone when you don't know them. Then, after a while, one of them nervously dropped the F-bomb and suddenly it was fallout five-hundred. They all had permission to use it, and so it relaxed itself into the train carriage as each of them tried proving their machismo by inserting that vulgar word into sentences in ever-more creative positions.
Here we were again. The same kind of groupthink on the VCB was permitting them to cross the boundary from professional to obscene and nobody seemed to have noticed.
This, I thought, exhaling off the chat, is why the Bible tells us not to sit in that seat, not to walk in that path, nor stand in that way. It's so easy to get pulled into the room and be part of it! Inevitably you look back and wonder why you stayed there, and how you'd explain that to someone who was offended but counted you as 'one of the lads' and now thought much less of you. You wanted to fit in, but it would have been far better to stand out.
To be fair, it's only happened a couple of times. Years ago, I witnessed outright racism in the pub garden and I just sat there, part of the problem. This was different. Quietly exiting the chat felt like the right thing to do. However, as I sat there, I was troubled still. Unless someone said something, it would probably happen again. So I sent a quick note to HR about it and left it with them. It isn't a nice feeling that, but it is the right one.
I do wonder whether remote working makes this kind of thing much harder. We want to bond, but it's tough-going, and humour and shared experience are probably things we crave. But like those lads on the train, there are new boundaries to find at home: a new way of doing things means a new way of behaving, and it's not always clear what that is in the zoomengeist we live in. I just hope I did an okay thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment