Cats Will Always Find Their Moment

Since the global health crisis, my boyfriend and I have seen many hilarious posts and videos online about people’s cats crashing Zoom call work meetings, and they always make us laugh. Neither of us has ever had an office job; we have always had the “essential” jobs of retail, food service, and general labor, so we never got the luxury of working from home in our pajamas during the health crisis.

The time comes this year when my boyfriend has to set up his life insurance policy through his job, and they request it be done over a Zoom call so they can go over all the paperwork in real time, since the main office is based out of another state. I’m sure you can guess where this is going.

Neither of us is very tech-savvy, so the hilarity of both of us trying to even figure out how to download Zoom and get it to work is a lovely enough experience by itself. But once the call gets going, everything goes smoothly.

[Boyfriend] is leaning against the kitchen island, going over this important and serious life and accident insurance information with the lady on the other end of the video call, and I’m sitting off to the side quietly sipping my coffee.

Our cat decides that now is the ideal time for some affection. She leaps up onto the counter and, before anyone can grab her, promptly walks across the laptop, stepping on a bunch of keys, and sticks her head directly up into my boyfriend’s face, demanding chin scratches, completely blocking him from the view of the camera with a mass of grey fluff.

The lady on the other end bursts out laughing in the middle of her sentence about beneficiaries in the event of my boyfriend’s accidental demise. My boyfriend also starts laughing (more out of embarrassment) and attempts to move the cat, but she wriggles away, hops back around, and just starts doing circles on the laptop keyboard, making all kinds of fun things happen on the screen along with beeping “error” sounds with each key she steps on.

I’m cracking up by this point, too, and I quickly intervene and grab up the cat and bring her to my lap.

It takes my boyfriend and the insurance lady a minute to regain their composure to resume talking about the serious matter of what would happen should my boyfriend die unexpectedly. 

After the call is over, I am delighted to point out that now we have finally had that hilarious “cat crashing a Zoom call” experience that we’ve always envied from most of the rest of the world.