How to quantify the camaraderie of 1200 days and 600 hours zoom time together
Throughout my career in the high-tech industry, I’ve often found myself surrounded by male-dominated teams and individuals. In fact, I’ve spent more than seventy percent of my time as the only female in the room or at the table during meetings.
To navigate this, I quickly trained myself to be “gender-blind,” a mindset that suited me well, especially as I’ve always been a bit of a tomboy. Since daycare, I’ve felt more comfortable playing and communicating with boys than girls at school. It didn’t help that I grew up surrounded by a string of boy cousins, including my own brother! This mindset has benefited me in many ways throughout my life.
However, there are a few things that set me apart from the male-dominated teams I worked with. One of those things was sentiment, especially when our team camaraderie began to fade as people moved on to new career paths.
As I got older, that sentiment gradually turned into a habit. I found myself mentally holding onto those moments of glory when we were working together, knowing all too well that our time together would come to an end. This feeling became more nostalgic as I realized that once we parted ways, we’d lose touch, especially before platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn came into play.
After the internet bubble burst, I switched careers and joined a new, fast-growing company in the SaaS cloud computing space. Before long, I realized that I was easily ten, if not fifteen, years older than most of my colleagues. I kept this fact quiet, and many of them didn’t realize until much later. I became the unofficial photographer and de facto “archivist” for our team events, like a loving parent to her clueless child. I was the one to connect us on Facebook, sharing our activities long before the platform became a hub for non-work-related acquaintances (at least in the U.S.).
I worked with the same group of people for almost two decades. Overtime was a norm, and whenever there was an outage, our team would gather in a “war room” to solve the issue together. I was often the one ordering takeout to feed the team.
I’d remind them half-jokingly, “Folks, we need to treat our time together with more gratitude. We spend more quality time with each other than we do with our spouses or children on a daily basis — especially when you factor in weekends and family time. And don’t get me started on the so-called friends you see less than five percent of the time compared to your work partners.”
I’ve always felt that working partners deserve more love and appreciation. When you come to work, you’re surrounded by a carefully chosen team. A great team is made up of individuals with complementary skills, specializations, and shared goals. When HR and hiring team do their jobs right, they also hire people with good personalities — people you actually enjoy working with. To be part of such a team is truly an honor and a stroke of luck.
I took photos of my work life with the same enthusiasm I did for my personal life. My co-workers quickly got used to me taking pictures during work events, and they didn’t mind me sharing them among our team. To them, I was like their loving parent or older sibling.
Then, at the brink of the 2020 pandemic, I changed careers again.
With work shifting to a virtual setting, our daily stand-up meetings became our most intimate Zoom FaceTimes. Even as a social extrovert, it took me a while to get used to seeing team members in their living rooms with kids running around in the background — it became the new norm.
Every day, we shared snippets of our personal lives — some in remote locations like Hawaii, New York, Vancouver, Costa Rica, and Australia. It was a chance to see each other beyond the office, in a way we wouldn’t have if we were still physically working together.
And then, last Friday, one of our team members moved on, and we waved goodbye. Since our team was scattered across different places and time zones, the only way to hold a farewell party was through Zoom again.
I didn’t like it. After spending five years staring at each other’s faces daily, the proper goodbye should have been a farewell luncheon, with lots of well-wishes, maybe some bar crawls, a signed postcard, and, of course, tears and a big hug.
If anyone asked me what my most distinct feeling was as a female in the workplace, I would say it’s the sentiment of camaraderie — watching it come and go. This feeling is much stronger than my awareness of gender disparity. Yet, I found it hard to share this sentiment with my male colleagues, especially the younger ones.
Five years of daily Zoom meetings is roughly equivalent to 1,200 days — 600 hours of staring into each other’s lives.
Am I the only one who cherishes that unique bond, while the rest of them are busy moving forward with their lives?
It might not only be a gender issue, but an age one as well. After all, I’m more of a time traveler type, thanks to my unique life experiences. I came from a place and time that felt like it’s separated by 200 years from where I first landed on this side of the Pacific Ocean.
