the zillennial pause

everyone talks about the millennial pause, when you wait for a half second before talking into your phone camera because you can't really trust any piece of technology and you never know quite if or quite when the phone will start recording, and when the phone now inevitably starts recording immediately and teenagers notice and make fun of you. however i'd like to introduce the zillennial pause, which has nothing to do with the actual age of zillennials really other than the fact that many of us feel the need to make a good impression in the remote workforce, but i thought it made sense as a name maybe. anyway the zillennial pause is kind of opposite the millennial pause—it is the one second that happens at the very end of every zoom (/meet/teams/webex/etc.) meeting when you've said goodbye and you are frantically looking for the "leave meeting" button (which then prompts the "are you sure you want to leave this meeting?" button) and you still have that goofy fake "i love my job" smile on your face before your computer finally turns off the camera and your face drops like a lead weight in a bubble bath back to your neutral-emotion-ass disinterested doomer screen stare. you feel a little awkward about it but it's ok because if you look you can see the other people on the meeting also rest their eyes not on you but on the bottom-right corners of their work laptops also trying to GTFO ASAP and get back to watching asmr youtube or cooking their rancho gordo bean-of-the-month or taking a nap or whatever else constitutes working from home. actually this also relates to the real reason i think this is specifically the zillennial pause and not the general WFH pause, which is that everyone above 40 on these calls doesn't do this, because either 1) they weren't smiling in the first place, work is a serious affair and it doesn't matter if anyone likes you, 2) as soon as they say goodbye their mouth opens and their face gets so close to the screen you can smell their breath, or 3) they never had their camera on because they were driving their kids to after-school circus camp and tesla hasn't added zoom as a supported app yet. don't be embarrassed everyone, keep it up and one day you'll also be your own CEO with no time for your family or the wellbeing of the planet <3 now get out there and endorse me on linkedin!