TIFU by playing guitar in zoom class

So this wasn’t today. It actually happened back in 2020, when the pandemic started. I was in college at the time, and all our classes got moved to Zoom. This was actually pretty good for me, because I have a short attention span and I’ve never been good at paying attention in class. So I was able to get through most of my classes with my camera and mic turned off, just playing music or video games or chatting with my roommates or eating food or doing whatever.

Except in one particular class, where the professor was very strict that everyone’s camera had to be on the whole time. So I got creative with ways to distract myself. At first, I was just watching YouTube videos on my computer, but then the professor told us that she could see which ones of us had other applications open in front of our Zoom screens, and called us out by name. So then I started using my phone during class, holding it awkwardly in front of my computer screen so that I could look at it but it wouldn’t be visible from my webcam.

Then one day, I was bored of using my phone, and tired of having to hold it in a weird position, and I came up with a great idea. I could just leave my mic off and practice guitar during class. So I set myself up at my desk before class, with my guitar in my lap and my camera focused on my upper body, so that my face was visible but the guitar wasn’t. I tuned into the class, sat there and played through some scales and riffs for an hour, then tuned out when the class was over.

After finishing class, I headed into the kitchen to make myself some lunch. My roommate was in there, and as soon as I walked in, he turned to me with a weird look and said “dude, what the fuck were you just doing in class?” I told him I was playing guitar, and he replied, through laughter, “well it looked like you were jacking off”. He showed me a screen recording he’d taken of me, and sure enough, there it was. I was looking down at my lap, where (unbeknownst to the class) the guitar was sitting, and moving my arm rhythmically up and down with each strum. Hell, if I didn’t know what I was up to, I would have thought it was masturbation too. I was wildly embarrassed at the realization that I’d just done this throughout an entire hour-long class. I never heard anything about it from the professor or any of the other students, but I still cringe whenever I think about it.

TL;DR – I thought I was sneaky while playing guitar during a zoom class, and the webcam angle of me moving my arm and looking downwards made it look as if I was vigorously masturbating throughout the entire class.