Video Chats

How long is a video chat? It’s a fair question, and there’s no honest single answer to it — which is the first thing worth knowing. Video Chats isn’t one conversation that either works or doesn’t. It’s a spread of them, and the spread is lopsided in a way nobody quite warns you about.

Most are over in seconds. Now and then one runs on long enough that you look up and the evening has moved without you. Both are normal, and the second kind is the only reason anybody opens the site twice.

What changes how long a call runs

You can’t do much about who the site hands you next. You can do a little about whether they stay, and almost all of it is unglamorous — the sort of thing that sounds beneath mentioning right up until you watch someone leave over it.

• Use headphones: more calls die on bad audio than on anything you said.
• Have one question ready: the first couple of seconds are the whole hurdle, and “hey” doesn’t clear it.
• Prop the phone against something: a picture that wobbles reads as someone already half gone.
• Let the skips go: you’ll get dropped mid-sentence by people who’d have liked you fine on a different evening.

The site’s own part in this is deliberately small. What matters isn’t how much sits on the screen; it’s how little sits between you and the next face.

Nobody opens one of these expecting a long conversation. They open it for the possibility of one — which is a different thing, and a far cheaper one to supply.

The part that doesn’t fit on a front page

There are dead hours. On a weekday morning the place can feel like a corridor with the lights left on, and patience doesn’t fix that — you’re simply there at the wrong time. Evenings are busier, most of them, and honestly that’s about as precise as anyone should pretend to be.

I gave it a wash cycle once, thirty-eight minutes by the machine. Nearly all of it went by in seconds at a time: a ceiling, a shrug, somebody’s forehead. Then a man in Porto, also waiting on a machine, also with nothing to do about it, and we spent the rest of the cycle disagreeing about how long a dryer ought to take. Then my wash finished, and that was the end of that.

That’s the shape of Video Chats, more or less. A lot of very little, and occasionally twenty minutes you’d never have thought to plan. What the old cam roulettes got wrong wasn’t the format — it was everything they charged you on the way to it.

So: keep the tab open on a flat half-hour rather than clearing an evening for it. Say a real hello, ask the one thing you were curious about, and don’t read anything into the ones that end before you’ve finished asking.

You won’t know which kind you’ve got until you’re a minute past the point where you’d normally have moved on.