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Surely it's not right? Bloke near us today with a posh voice using big words (probs off here) havung an important sounding zoom meeting. It can't be right surely?
Thinking
Privacy
Concentration
Actually being the right environment??
It would annoy me if someone was having one. And I'd not want to have one as I'd feel a nuisance to other cafe goers and maybe have confidentiality issues.
Is it just me, but if I even got a phone call (personal or work) in a cafe I'd either go out side to take it or call them back later?
It’s not, though I have done it at least once.
I imagine the people who own the cafe are less than impressed if someone is sat there sponging off their wifi for an hour and a half having bought one coffee?
I imagine the people who own the cafe are less than impressed if someone is sat there sponging off their wifi for an hour and a half having bought one coffee?
I know of a few cafes, mainly independents, which have a No Laptop rule to stop this exact thing.
Personal video chats in cafés? No problem. Just as annoying as that bloke on a cellphone.
Work video chats in a public space? No! Way!
Nope. Had many teams calls in the van and under bridges.
What's the issue here?
Their own confidentiality / whatever, that's on them.
Their impact on everyone else? Were they excessively loud?
Depends on the cafe really.
One near me encourage it. Gets people through the door for for breakfast and a couple of drinks and most folks don't stay more than a couple of hours.
Not much different to people having face to face meetings in cafes.
I was sat in Woods cyclery the other week, working but having bought 2 coffees, a cake and a sandwich over about 2 hours and keeping well out the way on a quiet Thursday, making sure I wasn’t using up a multi person table. Guy, probably off here, comes and sits next to me at the bar window seat, has to move a Frog bike off the display to do so and proceeds to join a group Zoom call right up next to me (thank god for good AirPods). Has one coffee and then leaves having properly pissed off not only me, but most of the rest of the shop/cafe. No! Not on. I don’t have an issue with working in cafes as long as your coffee consumption is appropriate to the time you are there and you don’t take up a table over lunch service, but not a zoom call, let alone 3” away from someone else!
We are not allowed to use public wifi for work, to have a meeting in a public place like a cafe would be gross misconduct.
Have a meeting every Monday morning a participant of which often joins from a train 🤷
Surely it depends on a person's job.
I don't pretend to have an important job or deal with sensitive information. Most of my meetings seem to involve deeply technical nerds talking in ultra-obscure terms and I'm lucky if I manage to stay awake while they drone on...
And people can talk loudly or hog a table/chair for too long whether they are talking in person to the mother or friend or kids or whatever, or on personal phone calls...🤷
less than impressed if someone is sat there sponging off their wifi for an hour and a half having bought one coffee?
Isn't that just the same as pretty much everyone else who goes into a coffee shop?
Have a meeting every Monday morning a participant of which often joins from a train
I would be pleased a colleague uses public transport.
I regularly call and Teams from the train on my travels.
Thinking, Concentration
Two things that never happen in a Teams meeting. Pretending to pay attention whilst watching the other monitor and trying to type whilst looking like you aren’t. That’s 99% of every Teams meeting I’ve ever attended.
I’m not even allowed to have Alexa listen to my work calls, public cafe would be a no, no for me. What exactly work think Amazon is going to do with me talking rubbish for 8 hours a day I do not know.
Just wander up, reach out by suggesting a mission critical deep dive to find low hanging fruit by ringfencing the unicorn, then circle back to your own table.
I once sat in a cafe opposite a woman on a lengthy Skype call who for reasons I can’t really fathom was awkwardly holding her laptop like an enormous comedy flip phone
screen to her ear, talking into the keyboard
Have a meeting every Monday morning a participant of which often joins from a train 🤷
We had people joining Teams meetings while driving. This made me… nervous.
We had people joining Teams meetings while driving.
We have this when we run webinars and training.
Anyone doing so is booted out the meeting immediately.
So exactly where are you supposed to go if you are out & about via public transport & need to join a teams meeting? I visit numerous mostly building sites in London & generally travel by tube, luckily I have very few teams meetings..
So exactly where are you supposed to go if you are out & about via public transport & need to join a teams meeting?<br /><br />
The Tower!
It seems really wrong and it’s really annoying. But I wouldn’t want to have to justify my opinion
I'll justify it for you. They are dickheads with no respect for anyone around them.
joining Teams meetings while driving
dismissible offence in my company. Unless you are in the back.
I've had an occasional meeting in a coffee shop. Always on headphones and a phone, not a laptop. Normally because I am off work, or at some conference and work happens. I’m always discrete. Teams filters background noise and voices effectively. Including overhead aircraft from home.
A whole thread for this? Grosse outlandishness!
A proper cafe shouldn’t have Wi-Fi . A few tabloids, maybe a radio on and food which is mostly fried. Large beakfast menu and a selection of lunches / dinners that nobody really bothers with. Tea, coffee or a tin of coke, no variations on coffee.
If you’re going to somewhere poncy expect ponces.
Cafes around here aren’t bothered and even advertised people to work from them as it’s business for them. No issue for me if you’re not loud and use headphones.
I’ve done them sat in the car before and it’s horrible, rather use a cafe.
It's tolerable if they are quiet and discrete. If they lack the self awareness or manners to moderate their volume and inflict the dullness of their jobs on other customers then they're ****s. If I was a cafe owner though I think it would irritate me and I'd be tempted to take a tougher line. Pull the wifi plug if they stayed for yonks sipping a long cold coffee. Or not even providing wifi in the first place. I can't see most cafe customers who are primarily there for coffee/cake rather than free office space being too upset by that.
The Tower!
Oddly enough a couple of my jobs were there earlier this year 😃
What’s the issue here?
......
Their impact on everyone else? Were they excessively loud?
Pretty much this. Yes, some people can't moderate their voice level in public but that's the same with people physically together in a cafe too. Or is it the one way nature (as in if they are using headphones you can't hear the other side of the conversation) that makes it annoying as it's a more intermittent noise rather than continuous back and forth background noise you can tune out.
Yes, people can be unaware and inconsiderate of their surroundings but others can be a bit oversensitive too.
My new post COVID reality are online parents' meetings. The number of parents who try and have their meetings whilst driving is pretty high. Or drunk - that's quite popular. Thankfully not both at the same time yet!
If they lack the self awareness or manners to moderate their volume
I have the same issue with folk having conversations with other folk sitting at the same table. Surely everybody should be sat in complete silence?
I have the same issue with folk having conversations with other folk sitting at the same table. Surely everybody should be sat in complete silence?
People having a face to face chat is different imo. A low burble of background conversation is normal, pleasant even. Somehow, two people having a conversation over a coffee seem to naturally be a bit more aware of their impact on others around them than someone on a phone or talking at a laptop. Dunno why, there's probably an interesting social experiment in there for someone. I think the one sided nature of what you're hearing is part of it too. I can't fully explain why, but I just find it really irritating!
A quick google suggests there is some science behind one sided conversations being more distracting.... https://www.cio.com/article/298862/consumer-technology-why-overhearing-one-side-of-cell-phone-calls-is-bad-for-you.html#:~:text=The%20researchers%20found%20that%20those,the%20unwilling%20participants%20quite%20irritated.
A quick google suggests there is some science behind one sided conversations being more distracting
You've met my wife then?
Remember having to work in offices? This is what it was like all day, except the coffee sucked.
Just wander up, reach out by suggesting a mission critical deep dive to find low hanging fruit by ringfencing the unicorn, then circle back to your own table.
Or stand behind them and quietly start undressing...
I've done it in the past when out and about, both in cafes and quiet pubs.
Grab a drink, fine a quiet corner, bang the headset on and you're away.
I normally hotspot to my phone as it's quicker but no issues using cafe/pub WiFi as work laptop always has a VPN on and I'm pretty confident the owners aren't on dialup paying by the minute for their internet.
Would it be more acceptable if it was an overpriced Costa or Starbucks at a service station?
@turboflard in a suburb and small/niche
Or stand behind them and quietly start undressing…
A mate of mine who is a bit of a nutter has a great technique to keep a bit of space around him on busy commuter trains. When someone walks along the carriage looking for a seat, he winks at them, pats the seat next to him then licks his lips. No one sits next to him!
No one sits next to him!
*Winks back, sits down and snuggles up*
When double bluffing goes wrong....
😂 that would be funny!
Or stand behind them and quietly start undressing…
An approach taken by a candidate on a GDPR training one of our team attended this year. Apparently the other webinar attendee thought she had switched off her camera and so started going for a full change...All other candidates were muted and so the chat erupted but the course lead was not looking...
Suspect a posh bloke using big words off here in a cafe is going to annoy you regardless of how he’s conducting his conversational discourse.
But yeah, depends really. One of the joys of remote working is being able to sit somewhere that serves nice coffee and cake while you work. I tend to try and avoid combining meetings and cafe but it sometimes happens and I just try use an accent and words no-one overhearing will understand.
On the one hand - we seem to now operate just do whatever you want these days. (I like old fashioned etiquette though.) And the person is hopefully spending money keeping the coffee shop going.
On the other - I mean, it's a coffee shop, stop pretending it's a working environment.
I don't mind; cafes are public spaces, and the public use them. I should think that café owners don't mind the business suit in the corner making calls, it's probably better for custom than an empty café after all.
If someone's being loud and obnoxious on the phone then I'll do the British thing and tskk to myself, I may even do a Paddington Bear hard-stare. But beyond that, isn't it just mild inconvenience? I dunno, maybe they flat-share and its the sharee's turn to have the lounge space to themselves, maybe their spouse works from home, maybe they've been told by their boss to drop everything and get on the call...
I've done it once when I was waiting to have my windscreen fixed (short notice and day before I was going on holiday so didn't have the luxury of picking a time), luckily the meeting I was in I was mostly listening, but I hadn't realised how noisy a cafe is even with headphones. Not an experience I wish to repeat in the future.
We also can't use public wifi so have to make do with phone hotspot
I just try use an accent and words no-one overhearing will understand
@thebunk Later today Cafe meeting 😉😊
Don't see what the problem is. Cafes are supposed to be busy places with people popping in and out. Trains also Ok with me. Firm no to restaurants and driving of course.
Why is it OK in a cafe but not a restaurant? What if the cafe also serves meals?
I don’t mind; cafes are public spaces, and the public use them.
Playing devil's advocate with the 'public space' logic, then you'd also be OK with someone having a teams meeting on their laptop in a church? A GPs waiting room? Your local bike shop?
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you btw, just wondering how the boundaries of acceptable/unacceptable are defined. I know these have been blurred a bit in recent years with WFH etc.
If you're discrete, but the people who have a phone at arms length and on loud speaker during calls.................
We are not allowed to use public wifi for work
Same here. I find this a bit odd as we use a VPN and even without that, things like Teams use encryption for data in transit and at rest. Maybe @cougar can provide some insight into this
Because not everyone is savvy or disciplned enough to use it consistently.
There is a lot of middle aged angst in this thread. 🙂 People doing new things!
I find that the loud music in most Cafes and coffee shops round here make taking teams calls impossible.
I don't know why they all have to have it.
Infuriated of Perthshire!
Have a meeting every Monday morning a participant of which often joins from a train 🤷
Errr, that's surely entirely normal?
The best thing about traveling by train is being productive and not spending several hours of my life that VW/Ford/Vauxhall/Citroen/whoever make a nice place to sit and waste several hours achieving nothing.
I have the same issue with folk having conversations with other folk sitting at the same table. Surely everybody should be sat in complete silence?
Most people:
- Use a volume level that you'd use in any other meting to project across a room.
- use either airpods or the laptops mic, neither of which are the right tool for the job. To stand a hope in hell's chance of differentiating your voice from the background the mic needs to be as close to your mouth as possible, and it decays by the square of distance, so your airpods 6" from your mouth are hearing it 36x quieter than a headset mic 1" away, to your laptopo a couple of feet away it's 576x quieter.
Surprised at the angst on this. Surely <i>most</i> are dialling in expecting to listen rather than speak, or do anything terribly important in a noisy environment? Presumably Dom Joly phone calls far more egregious as they’re two-way?
Cafe owner’s space so their rules, but it would be a curious list. No electronic devices, no phone calls, regulated conversation volume, limitations on conversational content … Or maybe leave alone the poor bugger having to whisper into a Teams call in the corner with a coffee and crumbly croissant?
Saying that, calls on trains in quiet carriage boil pee (cue aforementioned Paddington Bear stare).
My team used to be spread out and the weekly team meeting was when people were driving home. Some of us would have a 2 or 3 hour drive home.
On one team call I remember shouting "FU****" at the top of my voice as a tanker vered into my lane as I was about to pass. Meeting broke up soon after that!
I stopped talking on the calls after that and just listened in.
I stopped talking on the calls after that and just listened in.
I'll happily listen to a call that I have zero participation or need to see visuals in on the hands free while driving. - daily operations updates that kind of thing.
Anything I have to contribute to no chance.
Cafe depends on the cafe really. Costabucks .... No worries but I'll do it using the phones data.
I am a big fan of headsets. Even at home. Pet peeve in calls is people who think their laptop mic is an appropriate piece of hardware for a conference call. Newsflash You sound like a potato.
Pet peeve in calls is people who think their laptop mic is an appropriate piece of hardware for a conference call.
Infuriating.
Currently imagining a coffee shop scene where each and every chair is fitted with a hand brake and the clientele are ask just ratcheting them up and down like crazy while forking smashed avocado and pouring yak milk lattes down their throats.
I think I see the problem.
You're confusing cafes and libraries.
Trains also have quiet carriages, you're quite welcome to use them if you don't want to hear other folk working. If it's not an option then you were never going to have a quiet trip anyway.
I have occasional meetings in cafes via Teams or Webex and don't perceive that it is a major annoyance for other users, Reduction of background noise has reached a very advanced stage. I have seen demos of Webex where someone is on a meeting and someone else was using a vacuum cleaner a couple of feet away and that noise was completely inaudible to people on the call.
People working from diverse locations is only going to increase and, if they are considerate I cannot really see any issue with it.