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Follow the Mayor

Listen: Lo-Fi Transportation Beats To Relax / Study To by Mayor Pete & Friends

Admit it: you miss seeing this guy on stage. But never fear, he is still campaigning, even from his new office. Now that his big national moment has come, your friendly Transportation Secretary, Mayor Pete, is here to prove his cultural relevance with a super-cool infrastructure mix that you can find on a really rockin’ website called YouTube. “Lo-fi Transportation Beats to Relax/Study To” is eight minutes of elevator music playing alongside footage of bikes, boats and trains run through some kind of vintage filter. Occasionally Petey shows up with a sound bite about how the country relies on infrastructure. Makes you proud to be a Millennial American, doesn’t it?  

Not that you’re going anywhere

As we know, remote work is here to stay— not that we’ve figured out as a society how to do it well yet. It’s too many hours and somehow still not enough, but Harvard Business Review is here with a solution: “Remote Workers Need Small Talk, Too.” According to a fun study they did, hearing about your coworker’s weekend is an important component of feeling full and human, and they’ve got suggestions for forcing it on Zoom. Build in time at the start of every meeting for people to “exchange pleasantries and ask playful questions,” they say. Schedule mandatory “fun” like ““virtual lounges” in Slack. Try office video-chat roulette. (All of these things sound great if you have a cool team, actually, but if you do, you’ve probably figured out how to stay connected by now.) If your office has read this article and you’re still online at 7 pm white-knuckling it through “playful questions” at office drinks, there’s always the Zoom Escaper, a plugin that gives you the only legitimate excuse to leave a meeting: noise. The plugin can make it sound like your audio is failing, you’ve got a baby in distress, or like there’s construction outside. There’s also a “man weeping” option? Your meeting, your choice.

The optics log-off

Citi is instating “Zoom-free Fridays” across the company and boy, is it getting great press. “After listening to colleagues around the world, it became apparent we need to combat the ‘Zoom fatigue’ that many of us feel,” the CEO said to every publication ever. But here’s the catch: Citi employees still have to Zoom on Fridays. It’s just internal video calls that are off; client meetings are still very much in play. So the accurate label would be “slightly lighter Zoom Fridays,” but rather than to split hairs, why not give us the entire day off of everything?

Just go outside $

If you’re on one of those bikes, trains, or automobiles (commuting, even?!), it’s about to be a sweaty time and you’re going to need some protection. Let me introduce you to Type: A, a non-toxic, aluminum-free deodorant with sweat-activated technology. It’s long-lasting odor protection with no stains, no streaks, and no worries. Get yours here.

FYI you can also do a literal escape room on Zoom. I have already escaped by not attending.

Margot

$ = sponsored