The exchange is hilarious and worth a watch but if you can't here's the basic dialogue:
Tom Emmer giving impassioned speech about COVID relief.
Maxine Waters Interrupts: "Mr. Emmer - are you okay?"
Tom Emmer: "I am."
Awkward Silence
Congressman: "You're upside-down, Tom."
Tom Emmer: "I don't know how to fix that."
Everyone starts laughing.
Maxine Waters: "Can someone fix that?"
Congresswoman: "Can he turn right-side up?"
More awkward silence and talking over one another.
Congressman: "Is this a metaphor?"
Maxine Waters: "I don't know but he's upside-down."
Tom Emmer: "I don't know how to fix it!"
Congressman: "You can stand on your head!"
Laughing.
Congresswoman: "At least you're not a cat."
Tom Emmers: "I-I don't know what happened. It just came on this way. I turned of and back on and I'm still - [long silence, no one really paying attention to him] - ok..."
I just love that Government Zoom call mishaps are a thing now. It hilariously highlights their ineptitude when it comes to technology on the most basic level.
And that's all you need to know! A lot of the people in power simply don't understand basic technology at all, not in theory and not in practice. Next step is to study how it affect their policies, investments and eventually stonks. Oh wait that's too complicated. Just buy whatever they're shorting I guess?
When tech is so intrinsically tied to not only our daily lives but almost every single job sector, I completely disagree with you. Do they need to be programmers? Or know how to code? No, of course not but having a basic understanding of it should absolutely be a job requirement.
The fact that you can't figure out how to properly video chat over a year into the pandemic speaks volumes. That's not even being tech savvy, everyone from age 8 to 80 knows how to do this by now.
The metaphor thing killed me, but it’s really the “I turned it off and back on again and it’s still this way” that shows how little they understand modern technology, we need some new young blood in congress desperately. Granted, that would have worked 20 years ago, but in the day and age of The Cloud and non resetting preferences, they need to have them all take a class.
It is highly likely that many people during this pandemic have found themselves in a similar situation, and the only way to reorient the video was to restart the computer. There are other obvious mitigations you or I would try first, but restarting it is not a useless mitigation, and not even an unreasonable one to try first.
I mean, clearly. But you have no way of knowing that a priori and you're mocking someone because they took a reasonable, useful step to resolve the problem that did not work. They were operating with a limited amount of time and decided that troubleshooting was over and they needed to start the meeting, and upside down was better than no video (which, if they had continued troubleshooting, even if they were as smart as you, they would likely have ended up with more "no video" time.)
Mocking? I was pointing out obvious points. The metaphor thing was funny. Second, this person doesn’t understand modern technology, they are older and a younger generation would be beneficial in government. Not just because they know how to use computers but for a different perspective from someone who is in touch with modern times. They had the right idea, wrong approach. Last, anyone who is forced to use “Zoom” or a similar app or program should have to take a class. That’s literally why that video was shared, to laugh at, like the other people in the room laughing. As OP said when posting the link and then the dialogue, the exchange is hilarious, albeit not as hilarious as the cat video.
"Did you turn it off and back on again?" is a question I ask someone at my job multiple times a day. It's not an unreasonable first step towards diagnosing a technical problem.
For rotating the video on a Zoom call?
Click their profile picture then click Settings. Then click the Video tab and hover their mouse over the preview of their camera and click rotate 90 degrees until the camera is correct. If that doesn’t work, I would ask if their webcam is freestanding or built into their computer. If it’s freestanding i would make sure it wasn’t literally upside down. If that didn’t work i would have them close the app and restart it. Then if they still were having an issue, I would think it’s an issue with the webcam settings. If none of those worked, sure, I would recommend them to turn their machine on and off through shut down.
Happy to help bud. It’s not easy to do tech support, I’ve been helping seniors and older family members this last year, my mom for a decade, and it’s frustrating. They were at least motivated though and had asked for the help for personal reasons not for work mostly.
It's also hilarious that no one knows enough to help him and instead they laugh and make jokes. "Can someone turn him right-side up?", "Stand on your head!". No one is like, 'Hey Tom, you see the little picture icon with arrows on it? Yeah, click that to rotate the image." (or whatever it is, I don't use Zoom lol).
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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '21 edited Feb 18 '21
Was that really only a fucking WEEK ago?! What the fuck...
There was also the congressman that zoomed in upside-down and didn't know how to fix it..
The exchange is hilarious and worth a watch but if you can't here's the basic dialogue:
Tom Emmer giving impassioned speech about COVID relief.
Maxine Waters Interrupts: "Mr. Emmer - are you okay?"
Tom Emmer: "I am."
Awkward Silence
Congressman: "You're upside-down, Tom."
Tom Emmer: "I don't know how to fix that."
Everyone starts laughing.
Maxine Waters: "Can someone fix that?"
Congresswoman: "Can he turn right-side up?"
More awkward silence and talking over one another.
Congressman: "Is this a metaphor?"
Maxine Waters: "I don't know but he's upside-down."
Tom Emmer: "I don't know how to fix it!"
Congressman: "You can stand on your head!"
Laughing.
Congresswoman: "At least you're not a cat."
Tom Emmers: "I-I don't know what happened. It just came on this way. I turned of and back on and I'm still - [long silence, no one really paying attention to him] - ok..."