Nearly a year into this infernal pandemic, I don’t know a single person who isn’t sick to death of communicating by video. My husband conducts his business entirely through screens from a tiny office at the front of our house. My kids spend their days flitting from class to class without getting up from the chairs in their bedrooms (or, more honestly, from their beds). As a writer, I’m used to being on one screen or another, but normally I’m in total isolation.
When I do have to participate in a group video chat for whatever reason, I find it to be a draining, two-dimensional experience with too many distractions out of the camera’s scope. Plus I have yet to find my ‘angle’- I look like hell no matter how many books I stack beneath my laptop.
And yet it was precisely because of the ongoing pandemic, because of the existence of Zoom and the fact that people ages 1–99 all rely on this technology to communicate that the world was given the gift of Lawyer Cat. Unlike the endless cycle of memes, tweets and Tik Toks which are deliberately crafted to satirize (or to cope through the use of humor) with the events of the day, the Lawyer Cat video touched our hearts with its sincerity. Here was a guy who was probably using a device that his tech-savvy kids had gotten to first, just trying to do an honest day’s work in already less than…
