A speaker who used to shuttle between Jeddah and Riyadh for business meetings describes how the pandemic forced him onto Zoom, which he initially resisted as too informal. Now he sees it as a net gain: less travel, less fatigue, and unexpected uses like virtual fitness sessions with his trainer.
meetings will never be the same as going into a room before. I was constantly traveling just because of meeting customers. Now I think nobody wants me to travel, nobody wants me to come, I don't want to go. And I was always forced, like I would always say, like, why do I have to go? So I was always traveling between Jeddah, Riyadh, and now everybody's saying, no, let's do a Zoom. And I was like, before I used to tell you, let's do a Zoom, and nobody wanted to do Zoom because it was informal. It's not how we do business. Now this is it. This is, like it or not, this is it, and we're going to be moving forward. But it was, it's 5 years now advancement. So now we, we are relying on technology more than before. It's, it's, to me, it's very good. It makes my life easier. And, and now people were forced to use it. It's going to make their life as well easier, but they never gave it a chance. We always fight something that we don't know. But when we start using it, we start, you know, playing around with it, it becomes much more easier and we surrender to it. And then that's when we absorb it and we benefit from it. And I think, yes, we always have to look at the bright side. Yes, COVID is bad. It's done terrible things. My condolences to all the people that have loved ones that passed away from it, but really it has some kind of positive things from it, is that it helped us tremendously in pushing into developing more, using the technology in really good way. I now use Zoom even exercising. So I never thought in my wildest dream would I use Zoom in exercising. I have a trainer that is on Zoom, so fantastic. So it pushed me and it pushed a lot of us to think out of the box. We typically thought it was one thing, now we can use it into multiple things, so why not? And that's just me being positive and thinking, you know, positively of, you know, not continuing thinking, yes, it's a bad thing, we all know that, but we always develop from bad things good things.
