At my company, it's this.

Take special note of the improper (high) mix of the synthesized snare drum. A human being, when submitting this recording to AT&T, for money, thought that would be something that people would be cool with.

Y'know, some of the most intelligent, productive people in America have had their souls warped by that thing. YouTube has more examples. This is criminal.

If I ever meet the composer, I'll garrote him with piano wire.

I don't care if he's a woman enjoying the full feminist flower of girly participation in the 21st Century American miracle. Bitch goes down, whatever the gender.

Moar.

I love this video! I'm glad I'm not the only one to see how useless most of these conference calls are.

One thing that always frustrates me that wasn't addressed in the video is when you have several people in a real conference room and a room or two full of remote attendees on that speaker phone thing. Invariably, the speaker phone is on mute nearly the whole time and there is all manner of discussion in the room while the speaker on the phone is ignored. You wind up with two conversations going on and you can't possibly process either of them. You just know the same thing is going on in the remote conference rooms as well.

People that claim that they can "multi-task" by paying full attention to two conversations at the same time are full of it.

That ATT hold music is PARTICULARLY AWFUL!

Also, I find that little gets done in these but people feel otherwise because it's what they want to believe. (Especially the people who schedule them.)

They are missing the side IM (instant messenger) conversations that go on.

Actually these meetings are not so bad once you get adapted to them. While no where near as good as all people in the same room, they are functional. I average about 1 a day. My manager has about 6 per day. If he is running them they are usually quite effective.

Yes, the IM sidebar. People asking stupid questions about things that were just covered ten minutes ago. Drives me completely insane.

And the first thing my boss always says when we're on a conference call together is "is it on mute" because at some point he inevitably is going to say something that's only hysterically funny to the two of us.

The word "webinar" makes my flesh crawl.

I've done enough of them, especially webinars, that most of them aren't really a consult with everybody but a "We wanted to suck up your time to know that you actually read the 50 page PowerPoint presentation that could have fit on 3 pages."

Meanwhile most attendees are perfecting their doodles or solitaire skills.

The scourge of teleconferences is the person on the phone who gets another call and puts the conference on hold, causing their system's hold music to be played through the entire teleconference. At that point there's a mad scramble at the conference origination to contact the conference operator via another phone, and then the coference operator has to isolate each line to try to identify which line the hold music is coming from, and disconnect it. The alternative is to have the conference operator mute all lines and then enable them one at a time when a remote participant wishes to speak, but that's awkward and it tends to render the remote particpants into passive listeners.