Heath McCormack

R McGee

ENG 132.503

08 May 2020

Zoom CEO Runs Whole Operation Out of Ex-Girlfriend’s Garage

May 08 2020

SAN JOSE, CA (AP) - The online video conferencing and and virtual video

conferencing technology company Zoom announced yesterday that due to the Covid-19 Virus

outbreak, the mass shelter-in-place and subsequent quarantine Executive Orders issued by the

Trump Administration for the entire United States population, awareness that Zoom even exists

has increased exponentially. A Zoom video conference interview with founder and CEO Eric S.

Yuan yesterday was scheduled so that their new product, Putter, could be unveiled. However the

Zoom video interface interview was unsuccessful due to the fact that I have been quarantined at

my parent’s house; meaning the only source of non-telephonic communication with the outside

world must be accomplished using the “Family Computer”. This ancient machine audibly

labored, made loud clapping noises, and consumed around 30kWh during its 15-plus minute

initial boot-up phase. Operating systems present on this “computer” consist of Windows95 or

DOS, and connects to the internet using a modem my Father purchased at a garage sale in 1999

because he’s, “ … not paying those crooks at Suddenlink $3 a month to rent a modem when this

one works perfectly fine!” Additionally, downloading the current Zoom software filled the

computer’s hard drive almost to capacity as my Father did not allow me to delete any files to

make room for the platform, especially Solitaire and Minesweeper because, “… your Mother

plays those, sometimes.”

 While attempting to connect to the internet I was ultimately unable to establish a

connection with Mr. Yuan via Zoom which was lengthy enough to ask him a single question due

to several factors, including: antiquity of machine, filial resistance to post-Reagan era

technological advances, and the not-at-all-surprising incompatibility of Zoom with Netscape

Navigator 2.0. This bevy of buffoonery paled in comparison with the death-nail that was the dial-

up connection, boasting a maximum speed of 256 kbps. All may have been eventually sorted had

my Dad not picked up the kitchen phone receiver during the crucial squelching-noise-phase of

dial-up internet connection. After quickly hanging up, apologizing for not knowing that you

can’t use the phone and the internet at the same time, then pejoratively referring to Mr. Yuan as,

“that Oriental feller”, my Father just resigned himself to calling the Brookshire Brother’s

Pharmacy later that afternoon.

Forced to conduct the interview on a cordless telephone purchased from Radio Shack and

given to my Mother as a Christmas gift in 1995, if memory serves correctly, Mr. Yuan was

undaunted by our inability to interface like normal people living in a 1st World Country utilizing

his Zoom platform. He blathered on about the Covid-19 outbreak and subsequent quarantine by

saying, “Before this whole quarantine thing, people had never even heard of Zoom! Since 2011

I’ve basically been running the whole operation out of my ex-girlfriend’s garage on the

weekends when she lets me use her Wi-Fi as long as I stay out of the kitchen and also if her new

boyfriend isn’t home…. and also if I promise to stop texting her cell phone at 2am when I’m

drunk. Then last week someone retweeted a joke I made on Twitter about Adelle … and the rest

is history! Literally! Overnight, my company has gone from using a server that can reach

temperatures only measurable using the Kelvin Scale, basically 2 external hard drives that share

a hub I got at Target, to a hundreds-of-dollars per year company! It’s exciting because, even
though there are very few paid subscriptions to use the Zoom platform right now, I finally

proved to that bitch Sheila that I’m not a loser like she and her Mother and both her sisters and

her gay friend Renaldo say I am. So, HA! Who’s the loser now? I showed all of them, right!

Right? Sheila’s going to back with me now pretty soon. Probably.”

After a pregnant pause and hearing what I believed to be an attempt at stifling back a

deluge of man-sobbing, Mr. Yuan made up some crap about a thing he calls the “Netflix Effect”.

This phenomenon, wherein a single person will pay for a legitimate subscription to an online

service, then let all their friends and family, plus Phil at the office because he’s like, tooooootally

into Orange is the New Black and hasn’t seen season 5 yet, use that single username and

password to access content because it’s like, who cares? It’s just TV and everybody does it so

shut up. Mr. Yuan lamented about lost revenue and ROI and other business terms I didn’t learn

in college because I ate lunch with the cool kids and was not a nerd.

Finally, Mr. Yuan got about to the whole point of the interview, but only briefly touched

on his new product idea, which is slated to be unveiled in the coming months, and is aimed at

Baby-Boomers and, by extension, the tech-starved consumers such as myself, inextricably and

inescapably imprisoned in their parents’ home with a crap internet connection for the foreseeable

future. Mr. Yuan was mostly mum about the specifics of the service, but he did reveal its

intended name, “Putter,” and will, “… definitely be compatible with older model users and older

model computers which should have been melted down and scrapped for the miniscule amount

of gold which can be harvested through a labor intensive process in which the gold-to-effort-

yield ratio is massively disproportionate. The service will remain free for its initial launch, but

plans to sneak in a monthly recurring subscription, difficult for the septuagenarian-set to

understand how to cancel, will also neatly rely on simple, text-based descriptions of everything -
no webcams, or pants as my Father gleefully realized, required. I didn’t want to explain what a

“chat room” was, nor did I have the heart or the inclination to tell my Parents that stuff already

exists for free. Then I dropped a peppermint and missed the rest of the Mr. Yuan’s snake-oil

presentation; so I just hung up and asked my Mom to make a sandwich for me. She used leftover

ham from last night’s dinner, and that was more interesting than everything that occurred in my

life during the last 2.5 hours.

After little to no research on the subject, I have definitively concluded that these

machines of yesteryear used by our parents should be considered less a useful tool of

communication, and more of a fire hazard than a trashcan filled with gasoline that is already on

fire.

Putter will launch as soon as Mr. Yuan’s mood stabilizers and anti-psychotic medications

have been sorted.