The quarterly board review was the most important call of Priya's year. She had prepared for three days. Her presentation was excellent. Her camera background was a tasteful virtual bookshelf. Her lighting was perfect. She was, professionally speaking, ready.
What she was not ready for was Mango.
Mango was her cat. He was three years old, orange, and operated under the fundamental feline philosophy that the moment a human appears to need something to go smoothly is precisely the moment to introduce complexity.
The call started well. Priya presented her department's quarterly numbers with clarity and confidence. The board members nodded in the small rectangles of their video windows. Her manager gave her a thumbs up from his small rectangle. Twenty-two people were on the call. Things were going well.
Then Mango decided to get on the desk.
Priya, while continuing to present, moved Mango off the desk with her left hand. This is a skill all cat-owning remote workers develop — the one-handed cat removal while appearing to use both hands for something professional.
Mango got back on the desk.
She removed him again. He returned. This exchange, conducted below camera level, was invisible to twenty-three people in small rectangles.
Then Mango found the keyboard.
Priya was mid-sentence — "and looking at the Q4 projections we can see that" — when Mango walked across the keyboard with the specific intent that cats bring to walking across keyboards, which is to say no intent whatsoever and complete commitment.
The presentation moved forward twelve slides.
She corrected this, going back through the slides, which required moving Mango, who responded by making the sound that Mango specifically made when being moved away from somewhere he had decided to be — a loud, conversational yowl that was less a complaint and more a contribution to the discussion.
She had assumed she was on mute during the slide navigation. She was not on mute.
Twenty-three people heard: keyboard sounds, Priya saying "Mango, no, not now" in a firm undertone, Mango's response (substantial), Priya saying "I am literally in the most important meeting of my year" (not an undertone), and then the click of the mute button she had just discovered was not engaged.
There was a silence in the rectangles.
Then the board's CFO, a man named Krishnamurthy who had a reputation for severity, said: "Is Mango the cat?"
"Yes," Priya said, with the calm of someone who has passed through embarrassment and come out the other side.
"I also have a cat," Krishnamurthy said. "Mine is called Butter."
Three other board members mentioned their cats. The call went slightly off-schedule but generated more goodwill than a hundred polished presentations.
Priya's numbers were approved with commendation.
She found Mango in the kitchen afterward, eating his lunch with complete indifference to the professional jeopardy of the preceding hour.
She gave him extra food.
"Good job," she said, which she didn't entirely mean, but which wasn't entirely false either.
The mute button is the most important button on any video call platform. Check it before you speak, after you speak, and especially before you address your cat about his keyboard habits. This is not theoretical advice. Several careers have pivoted on exactly this distinction.