It's very difficult to adjust your tie during a video conference. It's easy to see whether it is straight or not since there's a great big television picture of your face right in front of you. But reach up and try to straighten it and you'll see what I mean.
The images are reversed, so when you try to move your hand from right to left, on the screen it moves left to right. To the person on the other end this makes you look pretty silly. Efforts to straighten your tie, fix your hair, or brush something off your jacket appear highly unco-ordinated.
Image reversal is one of the many disconcerting things about video conferences. Another is that the technology rarely seems to work.
Most in-house video conference systems borrow bandwidth from the computer network that carries e-mail, internet and everything else. How well the video conferences work then, depends on how active the whole computer system is. When the system gets busy, the picture starts to go fuzzy and jumpy, and worst of all, the audio starts to slow down.
When the audio slows down it creates a delay between you saying something and the other person hearing it. Even a delay of a fraction of a second will completely annihilate any chance of having a productive conversation.
Everyone has experienced this. You start talking and just then you realise that the other person had already started talking. So you stop. But they also just realise that you started talking so they stop too. So you start again, but so do they. And so on, until you both agree to give up and use the telephone.