I've been reliving this scenario over and over in my head all morning and I thought some of you might get a laugh from it if nothing else.
I got up unreasonably early this morning to have a zoom interview for a remote role with a company in a different time zone. I've done dozens of zoom meetings since Covid hit including hosting many of my own so I would like to think I have at least a slightly above average understanding of how zoom works.
I join the interview 5 minutes before it's due to begin and double check my camera angle and mic are set to the correct input device as I have headphones etc plugged in and the last thing I want is for zoom to default to the wrong input mic or speakers.
The interviewer joins at the agreed time and starts introducing himself. I am defaulted to muted and no video. I wait for him to finish introducing himself and then try to unmute/show my video and for both I'm met with an error popup saying “the host has not enabled participants to unmute themselves.
I quickly send a message in the zoom chat stating that he will have to enable me the option to unmute myself, or he will have to unmute me.
He reads my message and thinks for a moment then asks if I'm having technical issues.
I then write another message saying I am trying to unmute but I am seeing an error message stating “host is not allowing participants to unmute themselves” and that he will need to uncheck the box in settings which allows users to mute/unmute.
He reads my message then ponders it for about a minute then he says “if I'm having technical issues I should leave the meeting and rejoin and it might resolve it”.
I roll my eyes and audibly sigh at this point *thankfully he hasn't figured out how to enable my webcam or mic yet* and placate his request by leaving and rejoining the meeting so as not to sound bad by telling him that definitely wont work.
After I rejoin I am still getting the same response from zoom when I try to unmute so I politely reiterate to him that I'm still getting the same response and he will have to go into participant settings and options and uncheck the box which allows meeting attendees to mute/unmute themselves.
Again, he reads my message and thinks about it deeply for about a minute before saying “there are no issues on my side so the computer issues must be coming from your end. If we can't get these issues resolved in the next few minutes we will have to reschedule the interview”.
Anyway we got the issues resolved in the end and the interview went fine but my god, who lets these people loose. It was a technical role too and I had to talk about my technical/computer competency from several previous projects, I have absolutely no faith based on his basic pc abilities that he had any idea what I was talking about.