Quiz #96. Santa Scissorhands
How paying attention to every detail can bite you in the ass (even during the pandemic and especially at Christmas) in Steve's Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz for Sunday, December 20, 2020.
Sunday, December 20th, 4:04AM. Awake too early (again) in what is now a sorry sleep pattern that’s amplified by the fact that I fell asleep on Saturday night at 9:00PM.
Saturday, I was Santa Scissorhands. As noted in Quiz # 64. “My Data Does Matta,” Gary (RIP), a friend who played with me in a fantasy baseball league, once called me “Edward Scissorhands” for my ability to take the simplest things and turn them into a complicated mess. In fantasy sports, I try to find and exploit the smallest advantages I can score for my team. That sometimes prompts me to make stupid moves that I would not otherwise have made if I’d just taken a step back and let the real-life players do their thing. In fantasy sports, as in real life, less can be more--and too much can be, well, too much.
As noted in Quiz #13. OOO and Pure O, I sometimes take this “Edward Scissorhands” approach when it comes to Christmas. In past Christmases, I’ve set up a gift grid with each gift assigned a number, mixing who gives what to whom in a blended family and creating order with the best presents near the end and accessories (like batteries) never given before the present that might need those batteries. In our family, everyone is also assigned a wrapping paper. When you get a present for someone, you have to wrap it in “their” paper which makes the gift sorting and opening a lot smoother.
The Christmas grid and wrapping paper assignments from Christmas past.
In 2020, my Saturday before Christmas was consumed with getting ready for the family Zoom we’re having this Sunday with 25 members of our extended family. As noted in Quiz #94. “... it glows.” that family Zoom will include a white elephant gift exchange in which family members can “steal” anonymously given, grabbag presents from one another. I bought a corkboard and other implements to try to keep track online of who has which present as the stealing unfolds while more than 20 people open and steal the grabbag presents. I’d set aside Saturday to set up the corkboard with the presents and pictures of everyone in the family.
Saturday morning at 8:15AM, I talked with my sisters, Ginny and Susan, in what has been an unexpected blessing of this whole mess. Our Saturday phone calls have become a Covid routine. They started as a way to keep in touch during the early stages of the crisis and have now morphed into a welcome and wonderful weekend staple. I talk on the phone with my sisters using bluetooth earphones while Sara reads the New York Times.
When I started talking with my sisters about how to implement the corkboard in a virtual gift exchange on Zoom, Sara found herself drawn into the conversation. She knows more about Zoom than me, but after listening to the phone call from across the room, she walked away, realizing there was a flaw in my complicated plan.
I’d planned on setting up a laptop to dial into the Zoom, focusing its camera on the corkboard. The problem, of course, is that in a Zoom meeting, a silent participant in a large group is seen as a small frame in so-called “gallery” view. With more than 20 cameras in the grid on gallery view, no one would be able to see what was on the corkboard which would be its own grid of more than 20 photos and presents, represented by index cards covered in wrapping paper with a stick for the letter assigned to each anonymously-given gift.
When I got off the phone, Sara returned with her laptop and explained the flaw in my plan by pulling up Zoom and walking me through it. The solution, she pointed out, was to set up the gift exchange as an online document. That document could then be shared by the host which would make it appear large enough for people to read. As the gift stealing unfolded, one of us could make changes in that document and everyone would be able to read it and see what was going on.
After finally understanding the issue, I still did not want to give up on the idea of using the corkboard with pictures and props. For more than a few hours, I insisted on a separate solution to keep the corkboard. I have a Mac which is tied to my iPhone. That means I can Facetime from either my iPhone or Mac. What if we used my laptop for the online document in a shared screen--but with the Facetime set-up in a separate window on the desktop of my laptop, using the feed of an iPhone on a tripod, focused on the corkboard with the props?
Sara played along, but I agreed (after Sara insisted) that we needed to put the idea to the test--and to practice to see both how it would work and what it would look like. It was a Christmas comedy of errors. Sara’s laptop is a Dell so we needed to use my Mac to set up the dual-window screen of FaceTime on the left pointing to the corkboard and Google doc on the right, both set up to track the gift stealing.
Facetime video feed of the corkboard in left window; Google doc tracking gift stealing in right.
Because we were using my Mac, we couldn’t use my iPhone for the Facetime camera focused on the corkboard. We had to use Sara’s iPhone instead. There was audio feedback the first few times we tried to test the thing--and we’d scramble each time to mute the microphones on my laptop and Sara’s iPhone.
From the beginning, Sara insisted that she was not going to be Vanna White for the family Zoom gift exchange. If I wanted a corkboard with props, she wasn’t going to be the one standing at the corkboard, revealing each present as it was opened and then tracking who had which gifts as they were stolen. She did agree that she would make changes in the online document I’d created to track the gifts. In our tests that meant that she needed to be the host and use my Mac. I sat next to her, using her Dell, dialed into a practice Zoom so we could see what it looked like to other participants. Next to me was her iPhone on a tripod on a chair, pointed at the corkboard propped up on another chair beside and behind me.
We did more than a few test runs. Sara is accustomed to the mouse-like button on her Dell but she needed to be on my Mac as she entered information into the shared screen document and I had to reach across to help her navigate the mouse-less Mac. When I would go to change the settings on the practice Zoom meeting from her Dell, she’d need to reach over and guide me on the mouse-like button on her Dell. The FaceTime video feed of the corkboard kept switching from horizontal to vertical and we couldn’t figure out how to make it look right, even turning the corkboard on its side and upside down at one point to make it work.
To be clear, I was behind this bullheaded attempt to get technology--which I did not fully understand--to work with a jerry rigged solution more complicated than I have even described here. Santa Scissorhands. After more than a few hours, I finally gave up on the idea of using the corkboard in real time to track the gifts. It was clear through the practice sessions that the pictures and index cards on the board would not be visible for someone online.
I know what you’re thinking, “There’s an app for that!” There is--several in fact--which leads to an annoying thing that happened early on Saturday morning. As noted in Quiz #95. “This is as 2020 as it gets.” when I first shared the notion of tracking a virtual gift exchange with a corkboard, a friend sent me a link to a website which can be used for an online gift exchange. In my early Saturday scroll of social media, one of the first things on my Facebook feed was an ad for a different online app that can be used for an online gift exchange. I don’t post to Facebook, but it was clear that Facebook’s algorithms sorted through my digital footprints and knew that I was planning a virtual gift exchange. Maybe it was my Google searches. Maybe the algorithms were alerted by my emails.
As outlined in Quiz #50. 63, we can never forget that we’re being tracked in everything we do online. My solution is to do unexpected things online, searching for a product I’d never buy, to throw off the algorithms of what a 60-plus, white male from New Jersey might order. (If we all did it, we’d cripple the predictive powers of the algorithms.)
And yet, social media is capable of great moments. In my Saturday run through Facebook, I also noticed an article from Mitch Albom, paying tribute to Mary Schroeder, a Detroit-based, female sports photographer which had been posted to Facebook by a former colleague, Nora.
I emailed Nora.
Facebook may be a cesspool but reading that Mary Schroeder post and looking at her images made my day on a cold December morning.
It is a great read. Beyond Schroeder’s life story, her photos, embedded in the article, are equally outstanding, each one better than the last.
All photos by Mary Schroeder, online from the Free Press.
In my Saturday phone call with my sisters, Ginny told me that she wanted contact information for Dr. Ann Burnett. As noted in Quiz #95. “This is as 2020 as it gets.” Burnett is a retired university professor who studies holiday newsletters. She’s especially interested in getting copies of newsletters from 2020 to see what they say about the pandemic. Ginny wanted to share her own newsletter letter with Burnett. Both Susan and I remarked that we didn’t know that Ginny sent out a holiday newsletter. She said she didn’t send it to us because we already know her news. After the phone call, she sent it to us and she will now send it to Burnett. It’s not long and just lists the good things that happened in her and her family in 2020, from her retiring to ending the year with organized closets.
Another very strange thing happened in that phone call with my sisters. It started when Ginny described how her cat had woken her up in the night this week with strange noises. That prompted me to share that this week I’d had a very strange dream. A nightmare in fact. I don’t usually remember the details or images of my dreams. For me, what I remember is more what I was feeling in my dreams. This week, I think it was Tuesday night, I had a nightmare. Somehow I’d been trapped in a room and there was someone outside the room, My voice muzzled, I struggled to get their attention. In my dream and in our bed, I actually began to scream, “Help me! Help me!” This woke Sara up before it woke me. She was beyond scared that I was having a heart attack or stroke. Both terrified, we went back to sleep. Half an hour later, the same nightmare had me screaming again. I’ve never had a nightmare like that. Ever. My dreams are usually anxiety dreams, late for a test or not able to figure out if I had enough credits to graduate.
But here’s the strange thing. When I told this story to my sisters, my sister Susan revealed that this week she too had a nightmare. A nightmare that she was trapped in a shed. She couldn’t get out words but she started to make noises, noises so loud that her son heard them from the next room and he rushed in to see what was the matter. We’re not sure, but we think we had these nightmares on the same night--if not, it was certainly the same week. Susan too said she has never had a nightmare where she called out in danger. Strange, very strange.
In our phone call, we also talked about some of the funny (and occasionally acrimonious) things that have happened in our family’s grabbag gift exchange that we’ve held for decades--this year, online for the first time. This week, I’d actually talked with Ashley, a coworker and quiz reader about our family’s long history with a grabbag gift exchange. Her family also does the same thing and she described how one year the most popular present was one of those giant tubs of popcorn. The gift got stolen so many times that the next year, 3 people brought tubs of popcorn to the exchange--but only one of those tubs had popcorn in it. The other 2 had used the tub to hide their present and throw off anyone who might want to open the unknown grabbag present based on its size and wrapping alone. They had to institute a rule that people could not touch or shake the presents before picking them out. I told Ashley about how one member of our family had brought a framed picture of himself to the gift exchange. When it was opened, there were groans and it was not a popular present. After the exchange was over, the giftgiver told the person who’d gotten stuck with his framed picture to open up the back of the frame. Inside was a $20 bill. It turned out it was the best present in the bunch.
Part of the attraction of a grabbag exchange is not knowing what’s inside the gifts--and not knowing who gave what. Because we’re doing our exchange online, I have asked people to send me a link of the present they’ve picked out. After the exchange, everyone will then order their present, having it delivered to the person who ends up with it. That means I now know what everyone’s giving. They’re all very 2020. Among the gifts are face masks, a travel calendar, foot peel, 105 ounces of Cheez-its, a Trump teddy bear, a comfort candle, an iPad holder, an adult “Fuck Coronavirus” coloring book, a jigsaw puzzle and a toilet timer.
Several family members regularly read this quiz so I don’t want to send it out before the Zoom gift exchange which would spoil the fun if everyone were to know the gifts in advance. With Substack, however, you can set up your newsletter so it gets delivered at a future time and date. I usually set this coronavirus quiz up so that the answer gets set up first, at 11:58 PM on the given date. I set up the question to be delivered at 11:59 PM. In this way, when people first open their email, the question is at the top of their feed. On this Sunday, Santa Scissorhands will use this feature of Substack to send out this edition of the quiz (and answer). They will be sent out at 7:58 PM ET and 7:59 PM ET so that even multi-tasking family members on the Zoom will be unable to read this quiz until after the gift stealing is over.
Ho, ho, ho!
What did NOT happen?
A. On Friday morning, Betsy told me that she had no recollection of the photo I’d shared in the previous quiz of her crying in Santa’s arms as a toddler;
B. In our Saturday morning phone call, my sisters and I discovered and discussed our shared disdain for LED lights;
C. Will helped out in the middle of the practice Zoom on Saturday, but I left that out because the tale was already too long and complicated;
D. I ordered a Santa beard Covid face mask to wear during the Thode Family Christmas Zoom but because of delays with deliveries, it has yet to arrive;
E. I suggested to the coworkers on my team that we do an online gift exchange. We’re going to do it in January on the 6th, the Feast of the 3 Kings.
Want the answer?
Answer #96. Santa Scissorhands.
If you’re a subscriber, the answer will be sent to you as a separate email when the question is published.
Want more?
Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz #97. "Sur-prise, sur-prise, sur-prise!"
Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #95. “This is as 2020 as it gets.”
Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020
Here is an archive of all the quizzes.
The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.
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