When I started my job last October,  I was introduced to a virtual online meeting platform called ZOOM.  I had never heard of it. Seeing as my role has been remote-based from the beginning, with the majority of my meetings taking place online, I had to get up to speed very quickly.  My company had integrated this system as, luckily for me, it has been open to the work from home model for years in order to allow flexibility to source the right people for the right positions.  Flash forward to March of this year, and I think most everyone knows what ZOOM is today.

I thought it was a funny name. The first thing that came to my mind when I heard of it was a show that I loved as a kid.  For years I thought I had imagined ZOOM, the TV show that featured kids around my age, joking around performing little skits and tricks, with a cast that was not made up of typically beautiful child actors, but rather featured average kids of various ethnicities.  It  broadcast from Boston, Mass,  on PBS – an American show that I somehow managed to catch in Toronto, Canada.  I used to teach my little sister a cool trick with my arms that I learned from the show – it fascinated her, and we added it to our repertoire of clapping games and other crazy things we would do to keep ourselves entertained. How strange it was, though, as I got older, I would ask my classmates if they’d ever seen or heard of ZOOM, and I don’t think I ever met anyone else who had!  

So with focus on ZOOM the meeting platform during COVID times, how cool is it that others of my generation have brought these memories to life on the internet – I was NOT imagining it  – there’s a GIF!!   

(Apparently this first aired 48 years ago OMG 😱!!)

And you can catch Bernadette doing her revolutionary arm thing in this trippy video .

Where is this all going?   Well does anyone remember that goofy phrase I’ve used as a title for this post? It came from a ZOOM skit that used to crack me up – one kid after the other would point to an imaginary car, ask the next if they could see it, and so on down the line.  Yes, hilarious.  You have to remember, I was probably no more than seven years old at the time.

So here’s my very first car, a  brand spanking new 1989 Mercury Topaz that I bought after I got my very first job.  

And that was so random (oh wait a minute, was that another TV show?)