Zoom meetings - or worse, Teams meetings - are a necessary but tedious part of our daily reality in the pandemic.
Sure, you can figure out plenty of ways of avoiding meetings - such as the old reliable of switching off your camera and mic, or even just changing your background to your face motionless - but the fact is that you've got to sit through some crap.
Of course, you can always have a little fun with it. A farmer in England is now offering a service that allows a "show goat" to turn up in the middle of a Zoom meeting and basically disrupt the whole thing.
Farmer Dot McCarthy initially floated the idea as a joke, but when enough people took her up on it, it became a going concern. In fact, she recently told BBC that she's made a whopping £50,000 from it so far. As she tells it, the young farmer put it up on the farm's website as a joke and woke up the next morning to nearly 200 e-mails, all of them requesting a goat to interrupt a Zoom meeting.
Indeed, the power of the internet has meant that the goats are not just appearing in Zoom calls in the UK, but have already turned up in meetings in China, Russia, Australia and the US, with some people donating far more than the mere £5 appearance fee.
And the best part? The success of the idea is such that Dot has been able to keep her staff on without furloughing them, and is using the proceeds to convert Cronkshaw Fold Farm - what a name, by the way - to renewable energy.
The website offers numerous goats including Ozymandias, Kid of Kids, who is described as having "a deep enduring love of his own reflection" and "enjoys tallying his number of Tinder matches on the barn wall for all to see." Lisa, another goat, "enjoys watching 'Thelma & Louise' on repeat, eating snacks, and napping whenever the heck she fancies."
Clearly, Lisa is leading a life only some of us can dream about. You can book any one of the goats right here.
