FiL crawling round on work video call

What a loon! I’d be baffled, livid but find it hilarious in retrospect

Can you add a background to your teams/zoom settings? That way no one sees anything thats going on in your room?

Would a carrel desk fix the problem in the future? And in the meantime you could perhaps sit with a wall behind you so you see the door and put up a please wait sign for when you’re making a call in case anyone comes in.

You could have perhaps passed it off by saying something like...

"Excuse my FIL, he's on these tablets which seem to make him act like an animal. I think today he is a dog. He was a snake the other day in Waitrose, slithering about the aisles. And you should have seen him yesterday - he was a howler monkey! We couldn't hear the television at all."

This ⬆️

Oh yeah, just a minute, so easy to stick on another room in your house. DH and I both work from home two or three days a week. We have proper desks, chairs, IT facilties and storage but neither of us has a whole room each as a "dedicated office". Our rooms are multipurpose and it works fine. Sounds like the OP has far more of a dedicated space than we do!

No, it's a YOU problem. Failing to understand that people don't have mansions and houses and people have to be adaptable and rooms sometimes need more than one use for more than one person. Her FIL is a divvy, that's the only issue here.

How is your camera set up to be able to defect someone crawling on the floor?!
even if someone appears on background is it that big a deal? So many people work remotely these days I think people would understand even on an external call if someone popped in and out.

This! Sorry you felt awkward and embarrassed… but I’m finding this funny already. Hope you do too, in time.

You need a dedicated office instead of working in the guest room.

That is hilarious and I promise you’ll find it funny one day too. Don’t be too hard on FiL and I’m sure no one on the call minded, we are all allowed to be human! On a practical note, have you thought about adding a Teams background so that no one can see any future SAS moves?!

Ive only skimmed the responses but wondering if anyone has mentioned the Somerset Gimp yet 😆

Oh the trials and tribulations of Working from Home!🙄

😂😂

If your background is muted and he was crawling on the floor, I very much doubt they saw much. When we are in the office corridor and someone walks past you do get a flash of someone but not clear at all so someone on the floor wouldn’t have been clear at all. You could have excused yourself for 1 min and turned camera off and muted to ask him what he was doing. I’d get a do not enter sign, or better, go to the office when he is staying, especially since his bedroom doubles up as your office meaning he can’t go in (or shouldn’t). Tell him the external colleagues saw him crawling.

Not really "thick". Just not au fait with Teams calls. Also, most people put a background on for this very reason. I would assume she had a background on.

seems like a good way to put off a tiresome guest whom you dont want staying anyway,

Like when some neighbour asked if she could use my drive for one of her excess vehicles and I said I would work out a price and let her know.Never asked again.

You can still make out people with a blurred background on teams. On one call I could make out my colleagues partner getting his jacket and heading out the back door, she was in her kitchen. It was blurry but you could see the movement.

Ettiquette meant we didn’t mention it.

I any work from a different room as I need three screens so it’s not always possible to just move to another room. My bedroom doesn’t have a desk.

If I was working and MIL was staying she’d have to be booted out. She can’t take our room as it’s on another floor with no bathroom, as she visits the toilet 86 times a night I’d worry about her falling downstairs on one of her trips up and down. Plus our spare bed smells after she sleeps in it . Her house smells damp and so does she and her clothes and anything from the house ( I won’t ever tell her as she’d be mortified and upset).

People getting their knickers in a twist about the bedroom/office situation are ridiculous. I stay at a relative's who has the same set up and have the whole house to use while they're working. Do theses commenters want to pool together and fund your garden office for you?

You could also very easily position the camera so it only shows a wall behind you, not the door. Yes, this is something you could definitely do.

But the bottom line is that you didn't want to take your laptop into your bedroom for once to work from there, and want instead to massively inconvenience your guests. So don't invite anybody to stay.

OP needs her office to work so the only solution will be to stop inviting FIL to stay. He obviously lacks boundaries if just ignores her instructions and thinks it is OK for a grown man to interrupt a work call like that.

How strange. When I used Microsoft Teams, the blur background meant people in the background could be seen unless standing directly behind you. Maybe it's different for other platforms 🤷‍♀️ .

I do, however, love the image of your elderly FIL commando rolling his way around

This. It’s his room for the duration of his visit.

You're a terrible host. Work somewhere else if people are staying in your guest room, or tell them they can't stay.