Old Dogs … New Tricks!

We have all had to learn many new skills over the past 12 months. Zoom is a regular facility we all use for meetings with both friends and colleagues, but also for giving seminars and indeed lectures on a larger scale. Last week, I was invited to give a lecture for the Pakistani Orthodontic Society by Anwar Shah, one of my old trainees, who is now Dean of a Dental School and Professor of Orthodontics in Islamabad. I suggested recording the lecture on Zoom and I would just then join the Zoom platform on the day, to only do the Q&A session in ‘real time’ … he would then be much less dependent upon a perfect internet connection, as he at least had the complete lecture ‘in the bag’. I duly recorded the 45-minute lecture, finished just 30 seconds short of my allotted timeslot. Perfect. Imagine my disappointment when I downloaded my recording from the Cloud to find that the audio was completely silent. I checked my Sennheiser Portable Wireless Lavalier Mic Set (which I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone doing serious presentations on Zoom) and saw the transmitter was set to MUTE!