Had a dodgy stomach. Muted the mic & let out an almighty fart.

Only, as you'll have guessed (and I quickly guessed from the silence that followed), I'd missed the mute button.

I have a telephone headset with a "confusing" mute button. Sometimes it works normally, but quite often it will "double-toggle" (toggle twice as though I pressed it twice, which essentially has no effect) - so I'm either left muted or left un-muted, the same as before I pressed the button at all - so I have to press it again, sometimes several times, for it to actuary work.

While I'm at my desk, I have a visual indicator of mute status (a light that turns green for un-muted or red for muted), so I can easily tell if my mic is hot or not. My old headset had a nice audible beep reminder if I was muted, but the new headset? Nope, not-so-much.

I work from home, while my wife works at an office; so each morning she leaves, but I stay in the home office. I almost always see her off one way or another, usually doing or saying something funny as she heads out.

So, one day, I'm on a large conference call with a number of cross-team managers, and my wife is about to head out the door. With the meeting droning on in my headset, I was in the kitchen with her for a while helping finish clean up after breakfast and getting her ready to go.

She needed to pack an ice-pack for some reason, and for the random humor of it, I start screaming something to the effect of "GIMMIE YO ICE PACKS - GIMMIE ALLLL YO ICE PACKS - YEAH! YEAH! IMMA PUT MY BAAAAAAAAALLLLLS ON IT - WHOOOOOOOOO!"

During which time I am jumping around like a crazy person, including actually grabbing one of the ice packs, putting it down the front of my pants and screaming. Loudly.

It was after my own screaming I overheard more than one person yelling on the bridge line "YOU'RE NOT MUTED! YOU'RE NOT MUTED!"

I have seldom felt such raw, unadulterated panic.

I rushed back to my home office - yes, the green light is on my desk - my mic is hot. When I pressed mute at some point earlier in the call, it double-toggled, leaving me un-muted, and I never knew.

Even more embarrassing was the chat session I saw on my computer screen. It was from my manager (one of the managers on the call) - he had pinged me several times while I was in the kitchen.

It read something like:

hey, you there?
is that your phone
I think your phone isn't muted
mute
dude, mute
is that you?
MUTE!
did you just say balls?

Almond, are you there?

> Sure, of course.

Oh ok, it said you were on mute.

> I was, I always go on mute if I'm not talking to help cut down on background noise **hint hint**

That's very confusing for the rest of us, can you leave your mic on please?

> Right... Okay.

Client : We have performance issues on <this> page.

US : Testing with their data on : Xeon : All good, Core i7 : all good, Core i5 : all good, A smartphone : all good, core i5 UM version from 5 years ago (You know, 1.8Ghz, 2 cores, not 4) : all good.

US : Could you share your screen and show us ?

Client : Sure ! Shares his screen. Chrome is already opened. Refreshes the page, after 15 seconds, chrome : Would you like to stop script on this page ?”

US with mic on mute : “WTF?! It cannot happen here. It’s only a list of about 500 rows!”.

US : “Hello, could you open a tasks manager?”

Client : “ Sure, but I need to do it through here”

Some random VID interface popping up. Opens tasks manager with a beautiful “48 vCPUs detected”.

I have no idea how their virtualization is settled, but it seems to be messed up. Tomorrow going to be fun. I have a call at 9am to explain them their problem. Their IT will hate me forever.

If anyone has tips on Chrome through virtualization, please tell me.

EDIT : Yes 48. Not 4-8. It's not an error

Things that are no big deal but piss me off endlessly:

People who can't mute their mic in online meetings.
We don't need to hear your breathing, the constant "hmm"s, or the conversation of your room mate who doesn't use a headset and instead yells into the telephone on speaker mode all the time

<rant>So I'm new to the having-meetings-every-waking-moment-of-the-day thing... Just wondering if anyone is supposed to get anything done??
Or are we supposed to gather more and more work to do during each meeting?
The only times I've been able to do work is when I can mute the mic or say I'm in a "lunch meeting"!!
Does this happen to everybody???
</rant>

While attending an internal training session (some joining the meeting online and some present in the room), an online attendee did not mute their microphone and proceed to eat a packet of crisps/chips. And not softly, but like a horse.

We were also recording it, so now we can listen to it over and over ...

If you like breathing into the mic during a 60 minute conference call....for everyone's sanity, please mute yourself.

Does a fault free, top quality video conference call even exist or is the world going to continue to cause a skrillex dubsmash everytime somebody forgets to mute their mic?

Why can't some people just go to a quiet environment or use the damn mute button when they are not speaking over Skype?
Honestly, i wonder what some people do while a Skype meeting. According to the sounds they make either chewing on their mic or siting next to a highway. One guy today was taking out his goddamn dishes out of the diswasher udring the meeting, without muting himself. Other people appearently have a mic from the mid 1990's and using 56k modem. MY EARS HURT