Some guy on a different team fell asleep and started to snore loudly. A check of the participants showed one unmuted mic, so I DMed his boss, the host, and said “heads up: it’s Peter”.
Unfortunately, the presenter was sharing screen and hadn’t turned off notifications, so the whole room saw a pop up from me ratting out the guy.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Extra points if they break to the point they have to turn off their video.
This is actually a very good and general principle of behaviour: "act as if anything you say to anybody is overheard by everybody else in the world". Maybe you won't ever become a sneaky manager if you follow this principle, but you will certainly sleep well at night.
I was on a cybersecurity team. We were all guys and much younger at the time, so perhaps not the most mature. We also were pretty decent at what we did, so our egos were...let's go with our egos weren't in check. As a result we had a running competition of who was the best at defending their laptop from getting hacked by one of the others, and who was the best at hacking them. Notice of success was delivered by setting the desktop background and/or screensaver to one of the Absolut ad images with Fabio style men dressed in skimpy clothing. Have I covered the not very mature at the time? This also was around 2002, so social awareness of just how bad this behavior was, and how toxic it could have been if female colleagues saw it, was not on our radar at the time.
Anyways, this all came to a halt one day. The team lead had been hacked a couple days before, and the person doing it went a little overboard and put the image [1] on the screensaver, the main desktop, and the external monitor desktop. The lead deleted the image from the screensaver and the main desktop, but didn't expect it on the external monitor desktop and didn't check.
He discovered it when he connected his external monitor port to the big screen just before a presentation to a small room full of 2-stars and SESs, who were shocked at what they saw on the big screen. Our team got an earful (rightly so), and we were probably lucky we didn't get fired. That was the last of that competition, and he was getting razzed about it a little four years later when I left the company for greener pastures.
[1] The image. Warning, it is a graphic male image. https://www.advertisingarchives.co.uk/detail/32171/1/Billboa...
I'd set my DISPLAY environment variable to his desktop, then use xv to open whatever gross / unflattering / whatever pictures I'd found on the net that day.
Thankfully it only showed my phone number and not my name, and it was ambiguous enough not to be totally obvious. But still....
But my career has had much more upward trajectory, and I have had more fun by being actively sympathetic to my colleges mistakes and trying to "cover" for people instead of telling on them.
Of course I'd never cover for someone doing something illegal, but I stopped looking at work as a contest where I wanted to look the best, and decided to help everyone put their best presentation forward.
The weirdest thing is after I began to get a reputation for this, I am in a WAY better position to get someone fired if I really need to.
It can be annoying that Teams lets you mute but not unmute people, but thank god it doesn't.
I’ve never tried it myself as the mere concept of doing so is a huge invasion of privacy, but after learning that any meeting could have this option enabled, I no longer assume that my muted mic will stay that way.
For this reason I always keep my laptop Mike volume to 0, and use the mute button on my headset which is not computer controlled. And an external webcam which I can plug in when I want to.
In Zoom on Windows I go to Settings > Video > check Turn off video when joining meeting
I'm pretty sure that will stop anyone from forcing my camera on. But I think that setting defaults to unchecked, meaning by default Zoom automatically shows your video.
For extra protection:
Settings > Audio > uncheck Automatically join audio by computer when joining a meeting
Settings > Audio > check Mute my microphone when joining a meeting
Settings > Audio > uncheck Press and hold SPACE key to temporarily unmute yourself.
I also generally join a bogus empty meeting before any real meeting to preview and ensure my microphone, webcam, virtual background, filters, and studio effects are all the way I want them and not something silly from some playful meeting yesterday.
Somebody on the call would breathe heavily and grunt periodically, and it would cause the host to pause his presentation for a second until it stopped. After a few interruptions, the host finally said "Sorry folks, I'm getting some background noise, so I'm going to go ahead and mute everyone." and that was that.
To this day I still have no idea who it was making the noise or what they were doing. I am still amazed at how he handled that with a straight face as I was out of my chair laughing my ass off.