Student Spotlight: Your Mic’s Off

“No hey, Jake- uh- hey, Jake hold on a sec. Ja- hey- we can’t- we can’t hear anything you’re- JAKE- YOUR MIC’S OFF!”

That was the conversation our Doily Allergen reporter had with University of Iowa junior, Jake Zydzik, during a zoom interview. We were originally going to ask Jake about his work with Business Leaders in Christ, a student organization for Tippie students to worship God while also learning about insider trading. But the interview was quickly derailed when we couldn’t quite get Jake to understand that we couldn’t hear a single word he was saying.

We honestly still don’t even know what happened. We tried to tell him that his mic was off multiple times, but for some reason, the message never got through to him. He just kept talking. It was really strange, it was like he wasn’t even listening to a word we were saying, he was just so focused on what he was saying. It was probably one of the top 50 least productive interviews we’ve ever done.

Honestly, after about 20 minutes of trying to tell Jake that his mic was off, we got kind of bored. We thought it would be rude to just leave in the middle of the zoom meeting, so we all decided to just boot up Minecraft and play a little bit. We got some wood and stone, then started building a little house in the forest. If you’ve never played Minecraft, you gotta check it out. It’s super fun! Anyways, after a while we noticed that Jake was no longer in the zoom call, so we just assumed that he noticed we weren’t listening and left. But then we received a very strange follow-up email from him just a few minutes after we left the meeting:

“Dear Doily Allergen,

Thank you so much for interviewing me and talking to me a little bit about Business Leaders in Christ. I feel like we had a super engaging and productive conversation and I can’t wait to read the article you guys write about this. Please send it to me when it’s published!

-Jake Zydzik”

We didn’t want to embarrass the poor kid even more, but come on! How were we supposed to write an article about that? So we’re sorry Jake, maybe we could reschedule and you could, like, repeat what you said. I don’t know. Or you could come play Minecraft with us or something. Whatever you want, man. Up to you.