Tiny personal hell(s) of the week #2: offensive backlighting

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Welcome back to this new weekly-ish series dedicated to the insignificant problems and petty personal crises that torture me inside every day!

This week, I’m over-thinking about backlighting.

Does this lighting offend you?

When I take Zoom meetings, I sit at my desk facing the north wall of my office, and the south window is directly behind me. This results in some backlighting, but I’ve never really thought about it too much. If it’s a particularly bright time of day I might try mitigating it by turning on another lamp behind me, but that’s about it.

I had a meeting Tuesday night with a group a group of people I’ve previously worked with a ton, so I knew it’d be pretty casj — no need to try to impress anyone by busting out the ring light or putting on a bra or anything. These people used to see me 5 days a week on 10,000% stress and 0% sleep under bad 50,000-watt bulb fluorescent office lighting, so I’m pretty sure there’s no amount of good lighting now that will ever replace that as the permanent image of me they hold in their minds. I could look like this, and they’d still see this.

With all that in mind, I sorry-not-sorry’ed for my bad Zoom lighting. But then someone (jokingly) said: “Wow, and you’re backlit, you must really not respect us.”

Wait — is that a thing?? I’m asking you now, but I also asked out loud, then. In response I got one blank stare, one emoji thumbs-up that I’m pretty sure was making fun of me, and one non-sequitor about rats. In other words: not a clear answer at all, and then we jumped into working.

Still thinking about it the next morning, I turned to Google, like all of us do multiple times a day to make sure our behavior is human and normal.

At first I just got a bunch of general tips on how to “look [my] best” on Zoom calls, but then when I tweaked the search term to “Zoom etiquette,” lo and behold I found:

Oh my god.

And that’s according to the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, basically the Harvard of academic institutions with confusing names I’ve never heard of.

But I still can’t really tell if it’s considered disrespectful, per se. Is being backlit just something to avoid as a Zoom staging best practice? Or is it in fact the giant “fuck you” to everyone else on the call my friend/co-worker claimed? Is that what I’ve been uninentionally communicating in every meeting I’ve had on Zoom in the last year-plus?

Now you may be thinking, “just change your set-up.” And most of the time, I don’t mind moving my furniture around at all — in fact, roughly every 4-6 months I do it compulsively slash for fun. I start to feel an overwhelming, nagging sense that everything about the current layout is just WRONG — embarassing even! And not only do I need to fix it RIGHT AWAY so I can relax. Then when I’m done, I feel like I should text pictures to anyone who’s ever been to my house before with some sort of desperate apology, like “Please, you have to come back! THIS is my true home, not that troll hovel you saw where the couch was on the right instead of the left!”

But my office is tricky. It’s small, and I have to squeeze a desk, a makeshift treadmill desk (sitting is the new smoking) and a chair (ok sometimes I like sitting and smoking) in here. I’ve tried every other remotely possible configuration, but if the desk is against the far wall it slopes downward because the floor is uneven; if it’s against the near wall I feel cramped and like, well, I’m facing a wall; and to put it against the south wall I’d either have to take the door off its hinges or have it sit awkwardly about a foot out from the window because there’s a radiator that the previous owners painted pink for some reeason. Please believe me when I tell you: this way is the only way!

Wait hold on —

….

…

OK I just moved some stuff around to double-check something. And yes, this for sure is the best configuration.

So given that, I feel like I only have three other options for fixing this backlighting problem:

A) Just use a different room for meetings

B) Change nothing, no one cares

C) Walk straight into the ocean and never look back

Please advise!