Right Before I Hit Join

Okay. I've got maybe four minutes before I actually want to start, so let me do the thing I always forget to do, which is look at what the camera sees instead of what I see.

First thing. There's a coffee mug on my desk that's been there since, I think, two days ago, and there's a plate behind it with crumbs, and a hoodie thrown over the back of the other chair. None of that is in the call, technically, because it's off to the side, but I know the second I lean back I'll drift and it'll all swing into frame. So I'm just going to move it. Mug to the kitchen. Plate too. Hoodie folded badly and dropped on the bed where nobody can see. The desk doesn't have to be clean clean, just clean enough that I'm not the guy with a graveyard of dishes behind his head.

Now the light. This is the part I get wrong every single time. My window's behind me, off to the left, and it's afternoon so it's bright, and that means the camera is going to read the window as the thing it cares about and turn me into a dark blob with glowing edges. Classic. I either close the blind or I turn around. I'm not turning the whole setup around right now, that's a ten minute project, so blind down. Better. Now my face is the brightest thing instead of the wall behind me. I've got a lamp on the desk too and it was pointing at the wall for no reason, so I twist it so it bounces a little light back toward me. Not at me, that's harsh and I look like I'm being interrogated. Just sort of generally toward the front.

There's also the screen itself. When the room's dim and the monitor's cranked up, you get this blue-ish glow on your face that makes everyone look slightly unwell, like they've been awake for a conference they didn't want to attend. I notice it now. I pull the brightness down a notch and it helps. Small thing. Probably nobody would mention it but I'd notice it on them so I assume they'd notice it on me.

Camera height. Ugh. My laptop's flat on the desk which means the webcam is looking up my nose, and there's no flattering version of up-the-nose, that's just a fact of the universe. I stack it on a couple of books. Two should do it. Now the camera's roughly at my eye line, maybe a hair above, and the whole thing reads as me looking across at a person instead of looming down at them like I'm about to deliver bad news. I tilt the screen so the lens is square to my face and not aimed at the ceiling.

Lens. Let me actually look at the lens. Yeah. There's a smudge, there's always a smudge, it's a tiny camera and fingers find it. I breathe on it and wipe it with the corner of my shirt, which is not the recommended method for any piece of glass but it's what I've got. Already the test preview looks less like it's shot through fog. It's wild how much a clean lens does. You spend twenty minutes on lighting and then the dirty lens undoes all of it.

What's behind me now that the angle changed. The bookshelf is fine, books are fine, books make you look like you read which I sometimes do. But there's a poster that's a little much, and there's a tangle of cables hanging off the shelf edge that looks chaotic, and on the second shelf there's a, um, let's just say a personal item I don't need a stranger forming opinions about. I nudge the cables back. I move the item. The poster stays because honestly I can't be bothered and it's not that bad.

Sound. I clap once, listen. Room's got a little echo because it's mostly hard surfaces. Not much I can do in four minutes but the rug helps and I'm on it. The bigger issue is the fan. There's a fan running and the mic will pick that up as a constant hiss the whole time and I'll have stopped hearing it but they won't. Off it goes. Window's already shut. Outside there's occasionally a dog and occasionally a motorbike and I can't control those, but the steady stuff, the fan and the AC hum, that I can kill, so I kill it.

Notifications. This one bites me. Halfway through a good conversation a message slides in across the top of my screen with somebody's name and the first line of something private and we both see it. So I'm flipping on the do-not-disturb thing now, before, not after I've already been embarrassed. Phone face down too. The phone buzzing on a wooden desk is its own little earthquake and the mic loves it.

Water. I get a glass of water. I always think I won't need it and then twenty minutes in my voice goes scratchy and I'm doing that dry-throat swallow thing on camera. Glass within reach, off to the side, not in front of the lens where I'll knock it.

Posture, sort of. I sit back, then I catch myself slouching, then I sit up a little, not military straight, just not collapsed. When I'm hunched over I lean in toward the screen and my face gets huge and I'm breathing on the mic. Pulling back a few inches fixes the face-too-close thing and gives the camera a normal amount of me. Shoulders down. I've been carrying them up around my ears for some reason.

Quick last look at the preview. Light's on my face. Background's calm. I'm at eye level. Lens is clean. Nothing weird in frame, no dishes, no cables, no opinions-forming objects. Mug's gone. Good.

This is the part nobody tells you about, the little mental thing right before. Because all of that was the room and now there's just me, and the actual people on the other end of something like Knot.chat don't care about my lamp angle, they care whether I seem like a person who's present. So I take a second. One breath. I'm not auditioning. It's just talking to someone I haven't met yet, and most of those go fine, and the ones that don't I click past. Lower the stakes in my own head. Unclench the jaw, which I didn't notice was clenched.

Alright. The fan's off, the blind's down, the books are under the laptop, the smudge is gone, the water's there. Sitting back. Shoulders down. Looking at the lens, not at myself, because looking at my own face is the fastest way to look weird.

Okay. Join.