As pandemic concerns ease, and the number of people meeting from or working from home declines, I’m hoping something that became quite the thing during the abnormal-normal we lived through because of the pandemic will soon fade in to history. That’s the Virtual Meeting! I’ve been involved in a number of them since march of last year and pretty much without exception  the biggest challenge  has ben staying awake.  We had to learn how to meet virtually on the fly last year, using equipment that in many cases wasn’t designed for it. That meant many virtual meeting speakers were almost impossible to hear or understand. Some meetings have been punctuated with the sounds of barking dogs or screaming kids because the speakers were speaking from their home offices.   Learning how to mute microphones and turn off cameras  on computers or smart phones used in virtual meetings have seemed to be particularly challenging for some folks. It seems to me that if you’ve got to meet, it’s much better to meet in-person  face-to-face. That’s something many of us have learned over the past 15 months.  That’s the way I see it.