Here at UltraMegaCorp, we have a venerable tradition of frequent conference calls. We use conference calls for basic coordination within a team. We use them to monitor status and triage during emergencies. We also use them for large-scale meetings where only one person is permitted to speak.
The strange thing is, it seems as if 3/4 of us do not know conference-call etiquette. Conversational collisions are the norm.
Conference calls have a substantial, annoying delay. In part, it’s an artifact of the distances involved. Two-way communication all the way across the world requires a minimum of three-tenths of a second due to speed-of-light limitations (usually more like 7/10 of a second due to switching delays). The conferencing software itself introduces some more delay, and the fact that everybody has slightly different delays makes it even more difficult.
Add in several engineers from India, one person obviously working from home with a screaming baby in the background, a Chinese-born citizen who’s English is still barely comprehensible over the phone, one fellow with a strong Boston accent, lots of background noise, and a chubby nerd who has lived in Utah so long he can’t pronounce the letter “T” anymore, and you have yourself a recipe for disaster.
One of the funniest — and most typical — problems is what I call the “three-syllable tango”. You have two people who want to speak. They each get out three syllables before they hear the other person on the line, then they each shut up because they think they are talking over one another. They then hear the line clear, and start talking again, then hear someone talking over them and stop.
This morning, the longest chain of unintelligible gibberish involved three people and went on for a half-minute before a manager intervened and called out a name to speak next.
The other fun phenomenon of transcontinental conference calls among different nationalities with huge latency goes something like this: Ronjash: “So, I think we should (unintelligible) and leverage (unintelligible) to garble the flitznook and reposition our gobbledygook next time to avoid this behavior.” (Murmur of approval) Ronjash: “So, Matt, will you please follow-up with that?” Matt: “Uhh, yeah. Could you send the exact requirements via email so that I don’t forget?”
Nice cover, Matt. What you should have said to be truthful was “Dude, I have no idea what you just said. I agreed with you because I wanted to get off this conference call and back to my real work.” But asking for a follow-up email is more polite.
Last bit of hilarity: When everybody loses their minds at once. You’ve experienced the three-syllable-tango repeatedly throughout a conversation, and everybody simultaneously decides that they will just keep talking through interruptions.
So nobody understand what anybody else said.
One lonely voice pipes in, “Is that OK? Are we done then?”
For the first time in the conference call, there is unanimity. “Yes.”
“Ronjash has departed the call.” “John has departed the call.” “Matt has departed the call.” “Smeckel has departed the call.” “Njarev has departed the call.”
Our purpose clarified, we can face another two weeks until our next conference call.