By Apurba Roy
I woke up early this morning to get ready for my first class of the day. Saying goodbye to the weekend was hard but not nearly as hard as my next task: checking my email.
I opened my phone, already irritated that I had to be conscious before noon. But little did I know a lingering fear from the past was about to confront me directly in my inbox.
With a single unread email from my good pal D2L Brightspace, the collective trauma of Toronto Metropolitan University’s (TMU) pandemic “Zoom boomer” students was reignited within me.
With trembling fingers, I opened the app and watched as the worst possible scenario came true. We got a message from our communication professor saying, “Class will be held online this week due to unforeseen circumstances.” Honestly, the only unforeseen circumstance for me is this awful blast from the past.
If you’re a Zoom boomer like me, you know how strange, unforeseen and miserable Zoom classes were. Trying to make a human connection through a video call was an absolute nightmare and the fact that I understood the course material at all was a miracle. I can almost taste the 2020 dalgona coffee trend now.
And so it began an hour later as I dragged myself to my desk, fell into my chair and opened my laptop to log in to class. The war flashbacks hit me in the same way that questionable recipes used to hit our TikTok For You pages during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I could only imagine the dreadful three-hour class that awaited me. Questions like “Can you all hear me?” or “Can you all see my screen?” echoed in my brain, reminding me of how often I would hear those exact words in 2020. Memories of emoji reactions and spammed chat-boxes flashed behind my tired eyes as I began to recall everything that made Zoom classes traumatic. None of us were paying attention anyway. We never were…
None of us were paying attention anyway. We never were…
The height of lockdown was the strangest time in the past few years and those of us who entered university during that period are desperate to leave every remnant of it behind. I want so badly to abandon those memories—ones that send my heart racing whenever someone coughs around me in public. Just thinking about it makes me shudder.
“Aren’t there group activities we have to do in this class?” I asked myself, already struggling to stay awake at my desk. Of course, that means nothing other than painfully awkward ‘breakout rooms.’ Each one would be filled with a canvas of blank screens, people asking if there’s a class group chat and that one person who argues with their parents while their microphone is on.
Then my mind shifted to remembering all the ways I would slack off during these classes as a result of being in the comfort of my own home, such as falling asleep minutes after joining the call. Why bother staying awake if my Wi-Fi would cut out every time I tried to speak anyways, leading to my face getting stuck in the weirdest expressions?
As my mind continued to spiral, the clock struck 9 a.m. It was inevitably time to join class. Of course, as expected, it kicked off with having to sign in again with my school login.
After refreshing the app three times, getting my password wrong and changing it, I finally managed to join the Zoom call and the professor started class. Immediately, I couldn’t hear a single word.
I looked around at the sea of names decorating my screen, every camera shut off to hide our true “woke-up-like-this” faces. After what felt like forever, I cleared my throat, unmuted myself and said the magic words.
“Professor, you’re on mute!”
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