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Thanksgiving Zoom Etiquette with Mike Polk Jr.

The gang's all back together, virtually.

CLEVELAND — To say that The Holidays are going to be “different” this year seems like a skosh of an understatement. It’s gonna be weird. 

This is particularly upsetting to people, even more so than with most of the countless other accommodations we’ve been obliged to make in our everyday lives in order to keep ourselves and our families safe this year.

Kids have to learn from home, which is only rivaled in impressiveness by the teachers who had to learn to teach kids who have to learn from home.

Some of us had to learn to work from home and those who didn’t had to learn how to work in a whole new world and a new way. And for the most part, we figured all of that out.  

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Our response was far from perfect and there’s plenty of room for disagreement about how we’ve gone about it, (the topic has even been known to pop up on social media from time to time) but overall, we’ve managed to keep it together. And that might not sound like gushing praise for our society but given the nature and magnitude of what we’ve been up against, I think there’s something to be said for it. Great work on that guys.

But in addition to those adjustments, we’ve also had to make adjustments to less vital though nonetheless important aspects of our lives, those involving human interaction and culture.

We’ve been asked not to go to the bar, but if we do go to the bar, we’re told to leave before it has a chance to become fun. We’ve watched helplessly on television while our beloved baseball team played home games in front of no-one but cardboard cutouts of Nicholas Cage and Flo from Progressive. 

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And perhaps most harrowing of all, The Great Lakes Christmas Ale First Pour was forced to move to a virtual format this year, because THIS SINISTER, GODLESS VIRUS HOLDS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING SACRED!!!

Sorry. But I think I inadvertently just made the point I was trying to arrive at by succumbing to my rage just now. My point is, the reason everyone is getting so touchy about having to adjust their behavior for the holidays right now is that there’s something especially difficult for us about having to depart from or alter our TRADITIONS, particularly our traditions related to family. To have our familial traditions disrupted feels almost offensive and like a violation of our privacy. It’s a bridge too far.

This is all to say that the emotional reaction many have had to being given guidelines and instructions on how to (and how not to) safely celebrate the holidays is understandable.

Zoom get-togethers stink compared to real get-togethers. We all know that. It’s not the genuine human interaction we require as the social animals that we are.

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That being said, at the risk of ending this gloomy diatribe on a positive note, during the shooting of this Zoom Thanksgiving segment, which I just realized I have yet to mention even though I think that’s supposed to be the point of these supplemental attached articles (although to be honest it’s never been made very clear to me, but I digress). While we were shooting this and talking about what we were all thankful for, Betsy said that she was thankful for the technology like Zoom that lets us all keep in touch during this. And I realized what a truly great point that is. We complain about having to do all these Zoom meetings for work or the kids learning via similar apps, or how impersonal it is to have to hang out with friends and family this way.

But take a step back and think how fortunate we are for our technology to have advanced to this point. Of course, ideally, we would not have had to deal with a life-altering, catastrophic, global pandemic. But as long as we have to deal with it I’m glad that we at least live in an era where we have high-speed wi-fi, free video conferencing and the Uber Eats App.

I’m just saying, we’re lucky we have these technical options that endlessly frustrate us and are never quite good enough. Because this would be so much more difficult had it happened earlier in American history, and by that I mean 1994.

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Just imagine if we were all trying to work and socialize and communicate from home in the era of dial-up modems and AOL accounts. All of us frantically hoarding as many of those AOL Free 500 hours of internet trial CD-Roms. You AOL chatroom board meeting keeps getting interrupted because someone’s daughter keeps picking up the phone which disconnects everyone. You get it. That would be worse.

Of course I’d have preferred to see these WKYC comrades in person and pick on Jay face to face, that’s so much more rewarding. But in the spirit of Thanksgiving, rather than dwell on what I wish could be I’ll be thankful for what is. After all, at least in 2020 we get to see each other’s faces, if it were 1994 we’d only see our screen-names in a little chat box:

  • JayCrawdadPartyBoy@aol.com
  • ShookMANIMAL@aol.com
  • RussMitchellLUVS2Karaoke@aol.com
  • BetsyKlingonTrekkieFan1@aol.com
  • MikeSpinDoctors4LifePolk@aol.com
  • LeonBibb@aol.com  

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