I wrote a little snippet for a story up working on where the characters have problems all too familiar to anyone who’s used video conferencing:
We all met Chloe in the briefing room. Our survey ship was in orbit and Sophie its Captain was going to give us a status update over videolink. After a short while the accept call prompt came up on the screen and Chloe clicked the icon to accept the call.
Sophie’s image appeared on the screen and we saw her lips move but couldn’t hear her. “I think the audio settings must be wrong, let me take a look at the console.” Said Lisa our IT tech. Lisa fiddled with the settings and disconnected then reconnected the external speaker unit. “Can you hear us now?” said Lisa.
“Hi Lisa, sounds like everything is working now,” said Sophie on the other end of the link. At that point, the screen went blank and the buffering symbol appeared. I rolled my eyes nothing works on this planet, does it?