“Poor Jennifer” Video Conference Fail Is An Awkward Life Lesson About Working From Home

For anyone who is locked down and trying to work from home – particularly those with young children, grab a seat and put your coffee down so you don’t choke on it when the cringe-worthy laughter slaps you.

Because it will. Hard.

A YouTube video featuring a woman now known as “Poor Jennifer” has quickly gone viral as an awkwardly amusing cautionary tale about what NOT to do while video conferencing with your colleagues from home.

The 50-second clip (that has already amassed more than 881K views) features a screen that’s split into 11 small boxes. In each box there is a person patiently listening to the leader of their video conference.

The topic of the discussion appears to be the ethical standards around relationships between employees and clients- very serious stuff.

But one person isn’t sitting and listening patiently like the rest of her co-workers. “Jennifer” appears on camera walking through what we can assume is her house.

After a few seconds she finally sits down…

On the toilet. 

Apparently oblivious that her phone was still projecting her into the group conference, Jennifer gave everyone a clear view of herself as she dropped her drawers and popped a squat.

And that’s when the polite, muffled laughter sets in from her baffled colleagues.

The leader of the group -a female voice who does not appear on camera- is also apparently oblivious as to what’s happening because as someone says, “Poor Jennifer”, the leader asks, “What is happening? What happened?”

The (very) polite snorting and chuckling continues when one of the male participants says, “I saw nothing” while looking down and continuing to try and stop himself from laughing.

Jennifer eventually realizes what is happening, because she appears to panic and cover her phone, which very quickly goes dead. 

“Poor Jennifer” is the funniest damn thing on the Internet right now because it illustrates just how unprepared we all are to be working from home for an extended period of time. 

But alas, “poor Jennifer” indeed.

It’s unknown if the woman in the video conference is aware that she’s blowing up on YouTube. Several commenters even wondered out loud if posting a video like this without permission might fall under the category of revenge porn.

One commenter named E. Ellington, MSW wrote: “I was wondering if this falls under the revenge porn statute. If she did not upload this, or give permission, that company and the person who uploaded that should be in trouble.”

And several others also said that they reported it to YouTube as such, including one person named Emersive who wrote, “I reported it to YouTube as bullying and in my comment mentioned that I thought that this could be considered revenge porn. Not to rain on the parade here, I think it is funny thing if there was consent. However, I doubt there was any consent.”

Several sleuths attempted to identify who initially posted the video (my goodness; we really do have too much time on our hands with this lockdown). 

As Todd Fagin noted in the comments:

I certainly hope Jennifer has a good sense of humor about this. While this could certainly be humiliating, there is a very valuable lesson here as more and more business is conducted via Zoom.

It’s definitely an important message for everyone that’s adapting to working from home right now.

I laugh not at Jennifer, but at the absurdity of the times in which we are living. And, fortunately, we could not see anything beyond her actions.

And honestly, I couldn’t agree more.