Researchers have found that having either books or plants in the background during a Zoom meeting makes people seem more trustworthy.
The only things in the background when I’m in a Zoom meeting are Nintendo games, Gundam figurines, and occasionally my daughter singing the Sesame Street theme song. Not sure how trustworthy that makes me seem, but it does paint a very accurate picture of me as a very cool dude.
I like Zoom meetings, they are incredibly convenient and I find it amazing that even though the technology was already there, it took the pandemic for anyone to bother using it.
What I find even more amazing is that things which made the seamless transition from the real world to the virtual one during the pandemic have inexplicably gone backwards, and ditched Zoom.
Which brings me to the colossal waste of time and taxpayer resources known as AMO, the annual meeting and tradeshow for which is currently underway in Ottawa. For those unfamiliar with the acronym, AMO is the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, which should really make the acronym AOMOO but that’s a pet peeve for another time. Bad abbreviations aside, my issue with AMO is that it’s an annual conference that is little more than an excuse for municipal politicians to leave their sleepy towns and party in the big city for a week on the taxpayer’s dime.
Nothing happens at AMO that couldn’t be a Zoom meeting. AMO is just boring city hall politicians and staffers having boring meetings with provincial politicians and pretending like they did something useful.
The primary export from AMO is awkward photos of city hall infrastructure directors posing with some mid-level MPP’s parliamentary assistant. No actual work gets done at AMO. For ten years, every August I would ask local politicians what tangible commitments or specific agreements got completed at AMO and the answer was always the same: none.
Every single post-AMO quote from a municipal politician goes exactly like this: “We had a lot of very productive meetings with our provincial counterparts and we’ll leverage those synergies to work together to achieve actionable progress on some of our key initiatives.”
They just go there to yap about nothing then come back and yap about even less nothing
It’s just yap. They just go there to yap about nothing then come back and yap about even less nothing.
This year’s AMO conference had a keynote speech about “Land-use planning, resources, and climate change.” Climate change you say? Hey, here’s a hot tip for how AMO could make an actual impact on climate change: don’t do this thing in person.
Thousands and thousands of municipal politicians and city hall staff from all across Ontario drive across the entire length of the province to converge on Ottawa, merrily spewing carbon from their cars the entire way so that they can get there and listen to some blue-haired hippie tell them how to save the ozone layer or whatever.
Let’s do some back of the envelope math. Let’s say each Niagara municipality sends six people to AMO. The one-way journey for a single person to make the 500 kilometre trek from Niagara to Ottawa will emit 0.1 metric tonnes of CO2 per person.
So, 11 municipalities each sending six people roundtrip, that’s about 13 metric tonnes of CO2 for Niagara to participate in the pointlessness that is AMO each year. By comparison, an hour long Zoom meeting emits about 150 grams of carbon, so for the price of sending our Niagara politicians to AMO in person, we could instead host 86,700 continuous hours of Zoom meetings. That 3,612.5 days, non-stop. That’s 9.89 years, non-stop.
But we don’t. Instead we send them in cars. And who pays for the fuel for those cars? We, the taxpayers, do. And who pays for all their pricey hotel rooms, meals, and other expenses while they’re up there? We, the taxpayers, do.
What a colossal waste of time and energy. Shut it down. Shut it all down. Make it a Zoom meeting. I’ll even supply every politician in Niagara with their own Nintendo games and Gundam figurines to place in the background of their Zoom calls so they look cool.
James Culic likes Zoom meetings because then he doesn’t have to take a shower. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or zoom over to your keyboard and type a tart letter to the editor.
