I’ve been running some Yammer 101 training sessions for our company at different times of the day and night to cater for our overseas colleagues. These are ‘open’ sessions for anyone to join so it’s always a surprise to see who joins me to have a bit of a chat and also get to know what others do in the company. A few of the sessions had ‘no shows’ but a couple had some people.

I don’t mind this because that it is voluntary because it also allows the person to join out of their own accord and not mandated to join.

Today the session was on at midday and I was hungry. I had to be in two places at once.

Waiting for people to join me online AND in the kitchen making my lunch.

Oh what to do?

OBS to the rescue. I had created a video loop of myself and put it into OBS editing software. I turned Microsoft Teams Virtual Camera setting on and voila, I’m on the screen. Anyone joining thinks this is me and starts having a chat with me while I’m nodding and looking as if I’m really there.

Meanwhile I’m in the kitchen making my lunch.

It bides me time to get my sandwich and return to the desk to start the session.

If you want to learn how to do this, check out my post: Learning Obs which I wrote some time back. When I shared it on Twitter, it was one of the most tweeted and shared tweets I ever had. Academics told me to keep this quiet as they didn’t want their students onto it.

The only negative is that I change my hairstyles too often so today, I’ll create another more recent – and a much longer one than that – I may add some “freezing poses” into the loop to make it that little bit more real so people think their computer has frozen.