15 Most Embarrassing and Funny Zoom Meeting Moments

This time two months ago, you may have never even heard of Zoom, but now you might feel like you’re spending all your time there each day.

With millions of us now working from home, we’re having to get to grips with a kind of technology that we may never have used before, along with various co-workers of ours, all at the same time on a video call. Does that sound like a recipe for disaster to you? Well, if these stories are anything to go by, that’s because it is!

With that in mind, here are some of the most embarrassing and funny zoom meeting moments stories we’ve heard so far – for us, that is. We imagine the people from these stories, in most of them, didn’t enjoy it quite so much!

Click here to watch our video collection of most embarrassing and funny zoom meeting moments.

1. Technical Difficulties

“My boss recently held a meeting via Zoom, and had to make one of my co-workers the host so that he could screen share a presentation. This co-worker is a bit of an office clown and noticed later on in the meeting that he’d never given the hosting duties back to my boss… the meeting had started to go on for a while, and we were all getting pretty hungry and were ready to get off camera, and my co-worker obviously could tell.

He decided to get around this by kicking the boss from the meeting! The boss reclicked the link to join again but was kicked again a few minutes later.

This went on repeatedly until my boss decided to end the meeting early due to ‘technical difficulties’… I still don’t think he knows who was really behind it!”

2. Peep Show

“Me and my boyfriend both live alone, but decided to move in together whilst we’re on lockdown. It’s been pretty great for the most part! Only thing is, he’s on Furlough pay while I’m still working full-time from home, so at times, he forgets that I could be on the phone or video calls before he walks into the room. I’m sure you can see where this is going…

I had to go to a Zoom meeting one morning a few weeks back, and hadn’t told my boyfriend as he was asleep at the time. I texted him to tell him not to come into the living room for a while, as I was busy with my meeting. I guess he didn’t get the text though – about ten minutes into my meeting, my boyfriend walked straight into the living room, and into the background of my call, with a slice of toast in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, and wearing nothing but his pants.

So, so embarrassing. I was even more uncomfortable after stood there for a second wondering what to do, before just deciding to own it and sit on the sofa opposite me. Nobody could see him, but if they could, they’d see him almost crying with laughter.”

3. Don’t Forget To Tidy Up…

“One thing I’ve oddly really liked about Zoom meeting is looking at everyone’s background at what their rooms are like, so I always make sure there’s nothing dodgy in my own background because I know that someone’s going to look.

One of my workmates didn’t take that much care though… on a meeting the other day, I quickly noticed she’d left a – how can I put this? – adult toy on the table next to her bed. I’m not sure if anyone else noticed, but I thought I’d best let her know.

Her face, when she read my text to her, was so unfortunate but so funny. Needless to say, she very quickly started to have ‘issues’ with her computer and had to leave and rejoin a couple of minutes later – with her background cleaned up a little, of course.”

4. Model Material

“On a Zoom call with my friends, I’d set my custom background to a really embarrassing old photo of me – the sort where I’d taken it from the angle that gave my most exaggerated triple chin – to make my friends laugh. Of course, I forgot to reset it before hanging up, which meant that, come to my next work meeting, I of course joined with the same background. Needless to say, my boss didn’t find it as funny as my friends had.”

5. Truth Hurts

“My manager has been making us take part in daily Zoom briefings to talk about much work we’ve gotten done that day. It wasn’t a big deal at first, it only takes about 15 minutes, but after a while, it started to get annoying.

Anyway, I was on the meeting the other day, and we were held up waiting for one of my workmates so that we could start. I must have looked visibly annoyed because my dad asked what was up – thinking my mic was muted, I started ranting about the meetings and how I just can’t be bothered with them, and how my boss is an idiot for thinking the meetings are even helpful.

Turns out my mic wasn’t muted at all, and my boss and all my colleagues heard the entire thing. Lovely.”

6. Business On The Top…

“One of my workmates was using their phone for a meeting due to webcam issues. He’d propped his phone up somewhere on the desk, and all was going well until he accidentally nudged his desk and the phone fell onto the floor – revealing that while he had a smart work shirt on, he hadn’t bothered with pants at all. Nice Y-fronts, though.”

7. (Not Quite) Better Than Nothing

“A couple of my co-workers were fooling around with backgrounds and filters while we were waiting for our boss to arrive to the Zoom meeting.

Unfortunately, one of my friends couldn’t figure out how to completely remove her background, rather than just changing it to another one – she ended up doing the whole meeting with the grass background, because, after going through them in front of us all, she felt it was the best of a bad bunch.”

8. Screen Share Nightmare

“My boss started sharing his screen so that he could show us a presentation. He started sharing it before he’d actually opened the file (rookie error), and we all got a good look at his documents folder – nothing too embarrassing, but for some reason, he had about thirty photos of Lisa Rinna from The Real Housewives Of Beverley Hills saved to his computer. Would love to know why.”

9. Family Flush

“My mum and I both work from home at the moment, but she has to make a lot of work phone calls, so I tend to work in the kitchen instead. Next to our kitchen, we have a small, downstairs toilet. My dad came through the kitchen to use the toilet while I was on a Zoom meeting the other day…

I didn’t realize how good my microphone must be, because one of my co-workers messaged me to say that they could hear EVERYTHING. I haven’t told them why, but I’ve told both my parents to just use the main bathroom during work hours from now on.”

10. Cracking Open A Cold One

“Everyone on my team was in a Zoom meeting, when one of my co-workers wives bursts in, yelling at him about the fact she’d found a crate of empty beer cans hidden behind the couch.

She was pretty angry and when he said ‘honey, I’m in a meeting’, she really just didn’t care and carried on shouting anyway. He had the sense to mute his mic after that, but we weren’t really concentrating on the meeting – we were too busy trying to lipread and see what they were saying.”

11. Not So Silent-But-Deadly

“So, you know how you can set Zoom so that the view switches to whoever is speaking at the time? Well, I was recently in a Zoom meeting and a fart just… slipped out. I didn’t even think it was that loud but everything went silent from all my team and I could tell a couple of them looked like they were laughing – I sort of played along as well, half-smirking about it, thinking ‘well, even if it was loud enough that they’d heard it, there’s no way they’d know it was me’. Wrong.

One of my work friends messaged me asking ‘did you just fart?’. I texted back asking why she thought it was me – apparently, it was loud enough that when I farted, the ‘speaker view’ switched from our boss, who was speaking, to me. I’m considering just quitting now.”

12. Oh No!!

“My supervisor recently had to cut short a meeting he was in charge of, because his kid came in to him complaining that he’d ‘done an oh-no in my pants’. It was pretty funny.

Big fan of that kid – not only did he get me out of a meeting early, but he also taught me a great new phrase.”

13. Doing Your Duty

“I had a conference call to attend over Zoom. Not a full Zoom meeting, this was audio only, so I wasn’t too bothered by it. I didn’t even need to have my mic on, it was more just an update from the head of my team.

Anyway, I joined the meeting on my phone and just left it on the couch next to me while I played ‘Call of Duty’, and half-listened to everything the head of my team had to say. When I got off the call, I had texts from a few co-workers, and I felt sick. My camera had been on the whole time, from what I can only imagine was a terrible angle, showing me playing ‘Call of Duty’ in my pyjamas.

I hadn’t even showered. Thankfully, my mic was still off, otherwise, they were have heard me using some pretty foul language to the guys I was playing against…”

14. Tech Training

“One of my older co-workers doesn’t really use technology outside of our workplace, so Zoom is completely new to her. In our first big departmental Zoom meeting the other day, she was constantly having to ask her son to come and help her out, show her how to do different things.

Of course, she has no idea how to mute her mic either, so we could hear her getting frustrated with it, too, and none of us really had the heart to tell her – not even when she couldn’t work out how to leave the call and we could hear her pretty clearly cussing out Zoom under her breath.

Of course, she had to get her son to come back to help her with that, as well.”

15. That’s Not My Name

“While I was in a Zoom call with friends one night, we’d all been playing a drinking game, and had taken it in turns being the host. While one of my friends was hosting, she’d changed everyone’s display names as a joke.

I assumed it only kept that name for the particular call where it was changed since it had been changed by her and not me – it turns out I was wrong.

Long story short, I bet my boss was equally confused and unimpressed on Monday morning when Miss Chanandler Bong joined the weekly briefing.”

Rather them than us! So, is there anything we can take away from these stories?
Well, our advice would have to be to, first of all, familiarise yourself with Zoom before you start putting yourself out there on it, especially if your first calls are with your co-workers and your boss. Clearly, there’s a million and one different things that could go wrong – and most of them, it’s without you even realizing.

Oh, and, of course, always double-check your bedroom for anything embarrassing before you hit ‘Show Video’, make sure you remove your custom background before you leave your calls with friends, and possibly most importantly always double-check if your microphone is on!

Do you have another story you want to share? Please leave a comment below with your most embarrassing and funny zoom meeting moment!