Out there in Zoomland

Illustration by Victor Romanko.
Dylan Hostetter, Opinions and Humor Editor
It all started one morning when I woke up with a bit of a cold. You know the kind where you wake up feeling perfectly fine, but then you cough a little bit and decide it’s best for your personal health and wellness to spend the rest of the day in bed? Well, it was one of those.
Thankfully, I remembered all of my classes offered a hybrid option, so I grabbed my laptop and snuggled up under my covers. It dawned on me at that moment that I had the worst case of bed-head possibly ever seen — there was no way I was turning on my camera.
Then I realized I didn’t have to. While I did have to attend the class via Zoom, my professors had never said it was required to show my face. That meant I could do anything I wanted so long as they thought I was present and paying attention.
I felt as if I had stumbled across a gold mine. I could attend my classes while also doing all the other things I had never had time to do before, and I am not talking about scrolling TikTok for seven hours or napping, I mean real stuff. Important stuff.
The first week, I started by catching up on every television show I had ever missed out on. “The Sopranos”? Check. “The Wire”? Check. All 20 seasons of “Grey’s Anatomy”? You best believe it.
Eventually, I ran out of shows I wanted to see and started watching movies instead. I made it about 12 minutes into “Madame Web” before I swore off film as a medium and realized there were so many more productive things I could have been doing with my time.
I then learned all the useless skills I ever wanted to — juggling, origami, the yo-yo — all while listening to my professors drone on and on through my laptop. During one class, I even had an official representative of the Guinness World Records verify my title as the new world’s fastest cup stacker — but I wasn’t satisfied. I still needed to think bigger.
I had always dreamed of adventure, and I figured laptops are portable, so I decided to have some real fun and go skydiving. I almost blew my cover though, as my professor asked me to read a passage from our book out loud and I had to scream over the sound of the wind for anybody to hear me. It’s okay though, I am sure no one noticed.
It turns out free-solo climbing is a lot more difficult with a laptop strapped to your chest in a makeshift bjorn, but I survived. I bought a waterproof laptop case so I could go windsurfing in Hawaii and a special heated case for when I climbed the Himalayas. I could go anywhere in the world, from the hills of Italy to the National Mustard Museum in Wisconsin, and also attend class, as long as I had my laptop.
By midterms, I was more cultured, well-traveled and skilled than any of my classmates, and all with a perfect attendance record. When I did finally return to an in-person class, my professor was surprised to see I had such a rich tan in the middle of March, and I was surprised to realize that while I technically had been attending classes, I had no clue what had been happening in any of them.
It occurred to me that about halfway through the fourth season of “Grey’s Anatomy,” I started paying more attention to my hobbies than I did to school. Needless to say, I did not do very well on any of my tests. My professors refused to pass me for the semester, even after I offered to perform some sick yo-yo tricks in place of my poor grades.
Honestly, they should have seen this coming. I mean, what did these professors really think students were doing with their cameras off in class? Paying attention? Get real.