Plague Journal, Day 55: CoronaWorld oral history, AA videoconference organizers

Wednesday: In my continuing series of CoronaWorld oral histories, I interview a New Jersey couple helping move Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to videoconferences. The husband has been sober for 29 years, the wife for 12. They met in AA, began dating several years later, and have been married for almost three years. I edited our 60-minute conversation for clarity. 

Me: Describe your sobriety practice. 

Husband: I do daily prayers and meditation. I attend AA meetings three to four times a week. I actively sponsor men in the program. I’m also current chair for our intergroup — that’s a loosely tied association of individual AA groups in our two-county area. I host events, provide information, do different activities. 

Wife: I pray and meditate and read spiritual books every day. I go to two to three meetings a week. I sponsor a lot of women by leading them through the 12 steps. I also have a service commitment for our intergroup, and in the past I’ve served as chair. 

Me: Describe the transition you and your AA groups faced when CoronaWorld arrived. 

Husband: It was around March 10th when the order came down to reduce social gatherings to a maximum of 10 people. We’re one of the larger groups in our intergroup area, with 22 or 23 weekly meetings; we’ll have 15 to 20 attendees in smaller meetings, 60 to 70 in the larger ones. A lot of groups in our intergroup reached out to figure out how to stay compliant with the state order. And a lot of meetings tried for about a week: bringing in extra cleaning supplies, washing hands as soon as we came in, that kind of thing. 

Fast forward to March 22nd, when our personal home group made the decision to no longer have physical meetings. We had no real alternative at that point; we knew we couldn’t turn people away.

One thing to know about AA: the organization has a general service office in New York, which serves the U.S. and Canada. It’s filled with information, literature, service materials; we seek guidance from them on a regular basis. But it’s not in charge, and it wasn’t set up to deal with a crisis like this. One AA tradition is to maintain local autonomy: individual groups make their own decisions, and individual intergroups do also. The intergroups are on the front lines, dealing with the day-to-day. 

So we reached out to the New York intergroup, which is the largest in the world. They’d been preparing for about a week to take meetings online through Zoom. We borrowed a lot of what they’d done for meeting set-up and security. My wife quickly figured out how to manage the meetings. And we had a group that met at 7 p.m. that first night [Mon., March 23]. 

Wife: That first meeting felt like a blessing. I certainly miss being in the rooms and seeing everybody. But I don’t know where we’d be as a group of drunks if we had nothing to fall back on. For a lot of us, it’s a physical struggle to pick up the phone and call someone, ask for help. To be able to go online at 7 p.m. and see people in their Brady Bunch squares — it meant a lot. 

It’s been intense, I won’t lie. Parts of the transition have been difficult. We’re both working full-time — I’m a paralegal, and I’ve set up an office to work remotely — and doing the volunteering in between. I ended up getting overwhelmed. I was getting Zoom meetings up and running across our intergroup, maintaining all the meeting extensions and information online; we had more than 250 meetings listed. And I looked at my husband and said, “I need a work stoppage.” I got paralyzed. And he said, we’re getting you a committee. So now we have co-chairs for the website, helping set up meetings, making phone calls, answering questions. And that’s taken a lot of pressure off: I’m not doing this alone. It’s been a struggle, but I feel extremely blessed.

Me: What are the video meetings like? 

Husband: For me personally, I’m a 50-year-old man with a 100-year-old brain. I’m old-fashioned, and like most AAs I don’t like change. I resist technology as fiercely as I can. So I was resistant to the idea of online meetings. 

But in the AA community long-distance meetings are not new. At first people used telephone conferencing. Groups using online bulletin boards started in the late ‘80s, and email groups and chat rooms started in the ‘90s. Fellowship in remote areas — upper Canada, Antarctica — have used video meetings for a couple of decades. But they’ve been sparse, and there’s not much information about them. This was on a different scale: the whole world had to switch to this format. 

So initially I didn’t like the technology: it felt clunky, it was frustrating. And physical meetings are so important to our fellowship. And then on Day 2, we saw someone come to our video meeting who’d never experienced a physical meeting. And I saw the same thing happen as happens in every meeting: a bunch of people hung around afterward, talked to her, told her about AA literature, gave her their numbers, all the things we do in person. And since then, as we’ve gotten better at the technology, we’re actively sponsoring people on the new platform, we’re helping people go through the 12 steps on the new platform. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s pretty darned close. 

We’ve found Zoom the most user friendly, and that’s become the predominant platform. But groups are also using Google Meet, Skype, and others. I absolutely believe this online platform is helping us to save millions of alcoholics worldwide. When people in our program go a couple of weeks without a meeting, without one-on-one contact, they can get squirrelly, drop off the beam. That’s true for the whole fellowship worldwide: narcotics and cocaine addicts, gambling, food, and sex addicts. A few weeks of no meetings, and they can get up to — chicanery is not a strong enough word. It’s more like a dumpster fire. But this has bound our fellowship. We’ve actually witnessed an increase locally. Meetings that used to be 20 to 30 people are now getting 50; what used to be 50 are getting 100. Because meetings are so convenient and easy to attend, instead of going to two to four meetings a week people are going to two to four a day. We’re taking lemons and making really good lemonade out of it.

Me: How are you maintaining meeting security? 

Wife: On Zoom, they give a ton of options for securing a meeting. The ones we check for system set-up: make it mandatory for participants to be muted on entry; make it mandatory for people to turn their videos on; allow messages to be sent only to the host. Some meetings are password protected. A lot of the settings we use are for anonymity’s sake. We don’t allow recording, and we don’t allow people to save chats. It’s potentially dangerous if people are copying and pasting chats from the room, because people post personal details there. 

Then we enable waiting rooms upon entry. That means when you log in you’re not going directly to the meeting; you’re going to a waiting room, where you can be admitted one-by-one. We highly recommend that each meeting have co-hosts, one to run the meeting and another to see who’s coming into the waiting room. You can admit people if you recognize them, or let them sit there if they have sing-song or goofy names, like Ben Dover. 

Husband: In our meetings we know most of the people coming in, but now we’re getting plenty of visitors. You pick up cues of what to watch for. Some of the Zoom bombers don’t use names, so if you see people log in as “iPhone" or “Galaxy,” you keep your eye on them. Some of the Zoom bombers attack right away, so one of the most important things we do is mute participants on entry. If they come in blaring music or whatever, they have to unmute themselves first. 

These bombers can put up really offensive stuff — grotesque pictures, pornography, images of decapitation, KKK images, using the N word repeatedly. It can be incredibly disturbing. We have two ways to remove people. The best way is to put them back in the waiting room. Because if you click “Remove,” the host gets a pop-up box that says, “Are you sure?” And sometimes the bombers will come in three or five at once, and you’re clicking remove-remove-remove and looking for all the pop-up boxes and the meeting’s now in chaos. But you can put them in the waiting room immediately, and from there you can remove them. 

Then there are the chat features. Zoom bombers like to fill the chat boxes with the same offensive nonsense; they have it cut-and-pasted and ready to go on arrival. We change the settings so that individual participants can chat only with the host, not with each other. So then only the trusted servant running the meeting will see it, and they can see who’s posting it, and they can pop the bomber into the waiting room and then out.

Me: Why do you have participants turn their cameras on? 

Husband: We borrowed this from our friends in a London meeting, where the group conscience was to turn cameras on. The Zoom bombers don’t like to be identified. And while anonymity is vital to our group, we’re not anonymous to each other. You wouldn’t show up at a meeting with a paper bag over your head. 

We make allowances. Sometimes we’ve had essential workers calling in from their jobs, and they’ve asked to leave the camera off so no one can see or identify their job site or co-workers. They can message and say, “I’m at work, can you help me out.” Or people call in from landlines, or phones without cameras. We try to be reasonable. Most Zoom bombers are not calling from landlines. 

Wife: We know about one large meeting where a guy came in. He was using a normal name; he had his video camera on; the co-host let him in. There were more than 25 participants, meaning the co-hosts had to track more than one screen, and this guy was taking pictures of other participants before he was seen and removed. And then he used a picture of one the attendees and made it his profile picture, and he changed his name to their name, and the next time he came under that identity, and the host let him right in, and then he bombed the meeting. It’s amazing what people will go through to be disruptive.  

Me: Have you met resistance from participants who don’t want to follow these rules? 

Husband: Once we explain clearly why the rules are in place, if we’re transparent, most people will be reasonable. We have to look out for the group as a whole. Unless you’ve been in a meeting when a bombing happens — it’s extremely disturbing. And you don’t want hosts trying to communicate with the bombers: “Please stop,” that sort of thing. They don’t give a shit, and they’ll just continue. 

We want to avoid the worst outcome: that the group ends the meeting, and all of the people in need of recovery suddenly have none. What about the new person who really needs help? We’re not the Kiwanis Club or the Lions Club. The AA Fifth Tradition is not to be diverted from our primary purpose, which is to help the alcoholic who still suffers. These meetings are vital for our sobriety. People’s lives are on the line. Twelve-step programs can help like nothing else on the planet. There are other ways to get help for addiction, but if you’re trying to help a person change, there’s nothing like having walked in that person’s shoes. We’re all addicts. That puts us in a unique position to help. 

We’re fond of AA; we know drunks are pretty good people once we sober up and learn to contribute. So we have to adapt and grow. We haven’t let anything divert us: politics, world wars, economic downturns, terrorism. So we can’t let these people divert us. Better for us to educate ourselves, learn the technology, and learn how to filter out the idiots than just toss our hands up and saying, “You win.”

Me: What role do you think online meetings will play after CoronaWorld recedes? 

Wife: My hope is that they stay on, in addition to physical meetings. It’ll be up to our Higher Power, but if enough people are interested in continuing, then it will. The fact that they’re handicapped accessible is really wonderful. A girl joined a meeting recently while I was giving my security chitchat, wheelchair bound. She had her headset and mic, and she was all in. It was great to see. Because some of our meeting spaces are hard to access for the disabled. And this can give them a sense of being a part of, instead of being apart from. 

Me, I’m a hugger, at least with the girls. And I really miss that. But I’ve gotten a lot of out online meetings, and I hope they continue.

Husband: I think we’ll go back to a majority of physical meetings, where there’s not as much security risk. Believe me, if someone walked into our home group and started yelling the N word, they’d be stopped. But I think too many positives have happened for online meetings to stop.

We’ve complied a list of international meetings for our intergroup, and people have asked to share it. So now we have a one-page PDF with a link for Australian meetings, or New Zealand meetings, or Germany, or wherever; you can click the links and find links to 600 meetings taking place in New Zealand. You can grab your friends and sponsees and all show up. People have loved it.

Wife:  He’ll create a flyer, a really pretty media piece, and say, “Let’s go to three meetings today!” He’ll put on the times, the meeting IDs, the passwords. 

He’s been like Johnny Appleseed, sending out email and texts: We’re going to a meeting in New Zealand, hop on board. Now lots of people follow him.

To me, that’s been another blessing. I didn’t know anyone in London or Seattle until five weeks ago, and now I have friends there. There’s a couple from New York Intergroup that we spend time with virtually. People have been amazingly responsive.

Husband: It’s another way the online world is mirroring the physical world. In the physical world we’d often get six or 10 or 12 drunks to do a road trip, go to a meeting in someplace we’d never been. That’s what this is: a virtual road trip list. It’s been really cool and fun. 

Wife:  We had a workshop that had been scheduled for April 26 that got canceled. And in less than 10 days we put together an online workshop with speakers from London, Scotland, Hungary. We’d set up a virtual meeting room for 500 people; I was hoping we’d get 300. And at the last minute my husband said we should upgrade to 1,000. I thought that was pie-in-the-sky, and in the end we had more than 900. Seven or eight of us were manning the waiting room, but everyone was well behaved. So that keeps you pumped about what we’re doing. 

Husband: As I was doing prayer and meditation recently, I thought about this: Why? Why has AA thrived in this time of huge change? AA people don’t like change; if a group discusses changing a meeting time or topic it might create six months of debate. And here within a week we went to virtual, and it’s going really well. So why, beyond necessity, has this transition been so easy? 

In 1939, AA published The Big Book. And the authors mention: you won’t have the benefit of getting to know us personally, but this is a compilation of our experience from four years of group recovery. And once it was published, and people in California and England and Australia started to request it in the mail, they were getting the message in a virtual platform: the Big Book. So it came to me, I know from my Higher Power: It’s not that we’re just beginning to learn a virtual platform. We’ve all been feeding off a virtual platform for more than 80 years. And now we’re just learning to switch that platform from book to computer. 

(New York state numbers on Wednesday: 323,978 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.9 percent; 952 dead, to a total of 20,597 up 4.8 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,650, to a total of 66,678 up 2.7 percent.) 

I'm establishing an oral history of the pandemic; previous interviews include with a public college professor, a public middle school student, a private college dean, a public high school teacher, a public bilingual third-grade teacher, and a public charter high school teacher.