About Coronavirus 2020
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We know what you’ve been thinking, stuck indoors for days and days on end, feverishly scrolling through your Twitter and Instagram feeds as you sink lower and lower into the couch, life seeming to become one long stretch of day that never ends: Damn, my quarantine life would really be improved with an Old Bay-themed Zoom background.
Lucky you! The pandemic gods have answered your prayers. McCormick, the Baltimore-based spice company, has released a background you can upload to your Zoom calls inspired by its seafood seasoning Old Bay.
The background features a beach and a body of water with what looks like the Chesapeake Bay Bridge stretching across. On the beach sits a table with Old Bay, corn on the cob, and juicy crabs just waiting for you to pluck apart. And in an Old Bay-branded bucket is a pile of even more crabs, bodies piled up on each other like a game of tasty Jenga. The sun sets majestically over the water where, somewhat inexplicably, but also amazingly, a crab rides by on a jet ski.
It makes absolutely no sense (Damn it! Who gave that crab the keys to the jet ski?), and yet total sense. In an era that’s unprecedented for many of the folks living through it, where each day’s headline seems a little more grim and out-of-this-world than the last, it somehow seems perfectly reasonable: Of course you’d upload a crustacean-filled virtual background sponsored by a major spice company to your work conference call.
Damn, this dude really likes Old Bay, your coworkers will muse. Some may even wonder if you actually are on a beach, clicking through Excel spreadsheets with one hand, decimating clawed snacks with a mallet in the other. And Chad from accounting, who often forgets to go on mute, will squint closely to his screen, peering confusedly into the left side of your screen. Is that a crab riding a jet ski?, he’ll wonder, head tilting to the side. Hell yeah, it is Chad. Hell yeah.
Mimi Montgomery joined Washingtonian in 2018. She’s written for The Washington Post, Garden & Gun, Outside Magazine, Washington City Paper, DCist, and PoPVille. Originally from North Carolina, she now lives in Del Ray.
