Rant #2,381: Video!

Yes, video.

Or Video!

Let me explain my use of this word as the title of today's Rant.

First off, "Video!" was the name of a little-remembered chart song by Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra as a solo performer. It was used in the also-pretty-much-forgotten movie, 1984's "Electric Dreams," and it simply serves as a footnote to Lynne's long career.

Anyway, to bring "Video!", or "video" into the proper context, I have to digress a little bit.

I grew up in a place called Rochdale Village, which in the early to mid-1960s was a brand new community in the heart of South Jamaica, Queens, New York. I have written about this place often on this blog, and for good reason: the place was magical, at least for a time, and I still have many friends from the area, who have also moved on like I have, and we continue to converse on Facebook and meet up at reunions and such.

I have a couple of friends who, for the past couple of years, have gotten together for periodic dinners at Manhattan's restaurants to talk about the past, present and future.

These meetings have been fun, because even though at first many of us hadn't seen each other in decades, we kind of fell right in, talking as if we had kept in touch during those 40 years or so.

So a few months ago, the seven of us had planned to meet once again in late April, to chew the fat once again, talking about old times, current times and new times.

But then the unexpected happened. The coronavirus came to our doorsteps, and life changed, at least for now.

So we had to put off our get together for the present time, but one of our group came up with an excellent idea, something that I, personally, had never tried before: a video conference, where all of us could join in and speak to each other as if we were all in the same place, sitting at the same table in a restaurant in Manhattan.

I had only used such conferencing when my wife and I were in South Korea some years ago, and we were able to speak to our son on a daily basis to make sure he was OK when we were thousands of miles away from him. It worked then--I think we used FaceTime, if I remember correctly--and I was sure that it would work now, but using a different such service called Zoom.

Zoom is perfect for teleconferencing, but it has had a recent checkered history, with reported hacks during conferences, where dirty language and porn videos were placed by unscrupulous people with nothing to do with themselves. If I remember correctly, the New York City school system had been using Zoom up until recently, when the hacks became more prevalent.

So yesterday, at 7 p.m., I went onto the Zoom site, having downloaded the app on both my phone and my tablet, and lo and behold, all seven of us were part of the conference, and with a new member of our group joining too.

We spoke for over an hour during the teleconference, talking about the usual--our past, present and future--but with everything pretty much shaped by what we were all going through with the pandemic in place.

In fact, our newest group member is fighting the coronavirus right now as I write this, and he seems to be doing OK, thank God, and I am sure he will pull out of this before too long.

So we spoke, caught up on our families and what we are doing with our lives and how the virus is kind of shaping everything we do, and after slightly more than an hour, it was over.

It was a fun experience, and a learning experience too, at least for me.

I learned about Zoom, first of all, and no, we had no hacks at all.

At first when I went on, I had no sound, but I quickly figured that out.

From the beginning to the end, I could not figure out how to get everybody participating in the conference to appear on my tablet in a small box on the right side of my tablet screen, but I did hear their voices, and when they were the prominent speaker, their picture did appear. However, I kind of solved that problem by using my phone in concert with the tablet, and on the phone, I could see all the participants, so that worked out fine for me.

And the best thing is that we are all doing well, and even our new participant, who is dealing with the virus, there is no doubt in any of our minds that the next time we meet--whether in person or via videoconferencing--that he will have licked this, and it will only be a bad memory, and nothing more.

We hope to do this again in a few weeks, and while we can hopefully do this in person, I think that when we do it next, it will be using the Zoom platform.

That hour teleconference really was a lot of fun to do and to participate in, and I highly suggest using it, in particular with family-oriented holidays like Easter and Passover coming up around the bend.

We might not be able to meet in person, but using teleconferencing, we can all be there, if only via this method.

So yes, Jeff Lynne was right after all these years: it is "Video!" and yes, with that exclamation point.

(And just as a footnote to all of this, Lynne's Electric Light Orchestra's twelfth studio album, released in 2001, just happened to be called ... .

You guessed it.

"Zoom."

!)