Spot the Token Jerk in your video calls
It has been a year and over a thousand video calls on countless platforms. When I am not jumping in and out of calls – mostly professional, I am either attending a webinar or participating in one. Or I am in my online French lessons. Whenever a video call involves more than four – OK, let’s say, five persons, you are sure to encounter the token jerk (TJ). They pervade meetings and they are skilled at derailing the agenda and talking as the precious minutes trickle away. A TJ will never chair the meeting. He (yes, 99% of the time it’s a man) will skulk about in the shadows waiting to expose their jerk to unwitting meeting attendees. So, how do you spot the TJ in your meeting? Not every meeting has to have one, but with these zoom calls becoming the norm, many non-jerks are metamorphosing into TJs.
They always raise an issue that’s not on the table. Or totally unrelated. In fact, they even acknowledge that as such. If an interjection begins with, “On an unrelated note…” you’ve got your TJ right there. The only way to handle this is to nip it in the bud. Be savage. Tell them to stick to the topic. If you miss this opportunity, you may be in for a long lecture in a slow (deliberate), sonorous voice (they love the sound of their voice) that may take forever to finish and will inevitably be without conclusion.
They often keep their video off, turning it on ONLY to make the point they know they don’t have and shouldn’t be making. So until the crucial moment when they need to jerk up, they simply lurk.
They loathe agreement and accord. Meeting with clients going well? Be sure the TJ will turn off the mute button just before the next steps are being discussed. So if there’s agreement on purchasing playmobil, the TJ will say, “I thought we agreed on Lego.” He doesn’t just want to poop on a party (TJs never rear their heads if there are enough men in the room), he forces the group to revisit what they’ve already discussed for several minutes in the hope that the meeting will be inconclusive. Luckily, with experience, I have seen several skilful moderators shut down the TJ who attempts to create discord. But a TJ will still try.
What happens if more than one TJ appears in a meeting? This may sound too good to be true, but it is an advantage to have more than one TJ in the meeting. One TJ can sense another very quickly and challenge him to a pointless duel before the entire meeting. Yes, this happens ALL the time. Because their issues are always quite pointless, this fight is short lived but they fight till they flag. All business can resume when this is done and these TJs will never resurface… until the next meeting!
PS: Every example is drawn from a real life TJ lurking zoom rooms and hanging about in Google.
The writer, and the other stuff.
Hello. I’m Gitanjali — development practitioner, sometime author, full-time mother, and very part-time golfer. I’ve spent the last two decades working across South Asia, West Africa, and bits of the world in between, mostly on polio eradication, regional integration, global health, and gender.
This site is a collection of essays I started writing during the pandemic and never quite stopped. Some are field notes. Some are rants. Some are about the strange things you notice on a video call when you’re on your thousandth one. They are written from Switzerland, where I now live with my husband and our daughter.
Writing is how I figure out what I actually think. I publish in case any of it is useful — or, at minimum, mildly entertaining — to you.
If you’d like to get in touch, you can find me through the usual channels. Otherwise, thank you for reading.
Gitanjali
The writer, and the other stuff. Hello. I'm Gitanjali — development practitioner, sometime author, full-time mother, and very part-time golfer. I've spent the last two decades working across South Asia, West Africa, and bits of the world in between, mostly on polio eradication, regional integration, global health, and gender. This site is a collection of essays I started writing during the pandemic and never quite stopped. Some are field notes. Some are rants. Some are about the strange things you notice on a video call when you're on your thousandth one. They are written from Switzerland, where I now live with my husband and our daughter.
Writing is how I figure out what I actually think. I publish in case any of it is useful — or, at minimum, mildly entertaining — to you.If you'd like to get in touch, you can find me through the usual channels. Otherwise, thank you for reading.